Gone Off the Rails

The other day I am riding on the train to Osaka. The train is at full speed when it suddenly starts braking and hooting and the sound of something like broken glass under our feet is heard. It feels and sounds a bit like your bicycle skidding on the gravel (now I wish I had my IC to record it). After a noisy clutter, a sudden calm. Our train has halted on the Aikawa bridge. It is a sunny, crisp winter day. Ducks are motionless specks on the river surface. Very little moves, outside or inside the carriage. After about a minute we see a driver (presumably) and a young woman in uniform run past our window towards the rear of the train.

Inside, there is pregnant silence. A single young woman breaks it: she rings up her employer to announce her lateness (talking on the mobile phone on Japanese trains is rare and is normally met with mute contempt). Commuters try to avert each other’s eyes, perhaps unwilling to recognize traces of concern. But the more one tries not to notice the more perceptive one becomes. So I end up detecting those slight body movements which are inevitably interpreted as anxiety tics, being somewhat perturbed myself.

Ten or so minutes pass. Passengers are fidgety and growing tense, expecting to hear some sort of nerve-soothing announcement from the conductor. The driver and the same young woman in uniform run past the window in the opposite direction, towards the front of the train. The announcement finally comes on. It is rather a brief one, informing us of a ‘human accident’ – jinshin jiko. This phrase is commonly used in Japan and it usually refers to a suicide on the tracks. If there indeed was one, they must have promptly dealt with the body. But how? The train nevertheless moves on to everyone’s relief. The accident though has upset both the driver’s timetable and the driver himself, as the train horn switches to its loudest mode and is frequently applied for no apparent reason for the rest of the journey.

People throwing themselves under trains is commonplace in Japan. On average up to thousand such deaths each year. These acts are normally considered a public nuisance, if not a taboo. They go unreported in the press. The train companies can claim a compensation fee from the family of a person who committed suicide for disruption in service. Most people prefer not to think about it, and are more likely to give way to their petty annoyances about the delays that these unfortunate acts inevitably bring.

As for the ‘suiciders’ (why has this word not gone mainstream I wonder), these people are supposed to be considered failures. More often than not they are regarded as a disgrace to their friends and families. One of the most common cited reasons for suicide is people’s inability to cope with the pressure at work (the pressure to succeed is probably more conspicuous in Japan than anywhere else), which can lead to one losing their job and the overwhelming feeling of insecurity and unworthiness as a result.

So I got to thinking about success and failure, and that perhaps the line between a success and a failure is much thinner than most people like to think. Who knows how many people who consider themselves successful are in fact potential failures, how many of us unbiased train commuters are potential suicide cases? Is the old adage true then, that failure and success are on the opposite sides of the same coin? Who or what has exactly gone off the rails here? The felones-de-se? The train driver gone berserk with his horn? The thick-skinned society? Or me, writing this rubbish? As Bob Dylan sings on Blood on the Tracks, ‘Everything is a little upside down’. Almost nothing is what it seems to be.

All this talk brings me to two of the most famous fictionalized train suicides: Anna Karenina’s and Celia Johnson’s in Brief Encounter. Actually only the former one is a suicide, the second a rather glorious, failed attempt. The 1935 version of Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo is still the most satisfying one. If ever an actress’s eyes were so expressive!!

The coffee shop scene in Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) on the other hand never fails to lure a tear out of my eye.

Kyoto Sounds I

The other week I bought this thing called IC Recorder, a very useful gadget for recording sounds and noises in the immediate surroundings. So I recorded some, just outside my building. Now you can listen to three sound extracts off the streets of Kyoto, typical for this time of year. Given they were recorded from the fourth-floor balcony the resulting mp3s are of a very respectable quality.

The first snippet contains a pre-recorded song coming off the truck distributing oil to households which use kerosene stoves, an effective and relatively inexpensive way for heating your home (there is no such thing as central heating system in Japan, and only recently there are radiator-shaped heaters on sale which still work on electricity).

Listen to this lovely sound of a ‘ishiyaki imo’ truck selling hot sweet potatoes for those frozen passers-by willing to pay handsomely for this little delicacy – a single yam will cost you 600 yen, which is about €6! The chant is so resonant that imagination immediately transports me to those times when life used to be slow and simple.

The last sound-bite is of a procession of Shinto monks who occasionally walk the streets in the early morning hours doing their alms-rounds, ‘droning like hornets’ as someone put it. This was my first ever recording done on a very windy day.

Happy Dinoyear

“Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time?  I want an interregnum.” – said John Dos Passos in 1917. Indeed, why don’t we decide to have an intermission between two years – a few unaccounted for, ‘dead’ days ­– something like a still screen-caption in the early days of television, with soft background music, as a space to pause and reflect, or simply stop altogether, relinquishing even reflection.

But this question sounds close to absurd in this day and age. How can it have any merit when our lifestyles and social trends are pulling us in just the opposite direction, as many services and businesses are open round the clock (we need warmer shoes and cooler clothes), as people put in more working hours (more money to buy the above), hell even footballers play games on New Year’s Eve nowadays and, what’s worse, many of us are watching (humans get bored easily). On New Year’s Eve we pick a talking head, out of hundreds to pick from, to wish us a prosperous year (humans will talk, no matter what you do to them). On Facebook , we cc the NY cards to hundreds of ‘friends’ we never met (take away their warm houses and comfy chairs and humans will perish). The calendar pages must keep turning over. That’s our lot. We are the prisoners of our own misplaced imagination. And so, the New Year hols are here to stay, for now, each year’s end affording us less and less time to notice it.

Being one of the lucky ones to actually have holidays, I’ve been watching documentaries and pondering DINOSAURS lately. Yes, dinos, those losers. Except they are not, not really. They were simply terribly unlucky with that meteor that’s all. Dinosaurs are the most successful species ever. Not only were they dominant for the staggering 160 million years (compared with the paltry 200,000 years of the existence of Homo sapiens) but they still live on this planet today in the form of birds – the direct descendants of a certain type of dinosaur.

Dinosaur Revolution aired recently on Discovery Channel in Japan (and perhaps worldwide?), is a dino show with a difference: most creatures are given a 'private', commentary-free treatment, with personal dramas and challenges to contend with. The monsters, big and small, are still roaring and thudding about, like in, say, ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’, but much less cartoonishly so. The following scene shows the last hours of one of the last dinosaurs ever - troodon. The troodon gradually realizes that his days are numbered as he seeks shelter from the ubiquitous permafrost. Finally he finds one - inside the giant jaws of another long-dead dinosaur! The symbolism is obvious, yet thoroughly poignant. 

 

 Happy DINOYEAR

Feckin Sale

After spotting the sign I simply had to get into the shop, located in the heart of Kyoto’s shopping district. Whichever profit-minded skull dreamt the sign up certainly does not dream of Stevens’ ‘baboons and periwinkles’. And, judging by the goods (the leopard-patterned leotards, skirts, scarves etc), the clientele (twenty-something flirts donned in kindred mini-pants and platform shoes) and the glittery atmosphere (jazzy brightness, shop assistants pacing frantically about, Sex and the City playing in the corner), neither does the sizeable portion of Kyoto youth.  

Christmas Somniloquist

A Somniloquist

Christmas Eve, near midnight.

The room has fallen silent,

swallowed up by darkness

save for my make-believe face

lit by the laptop light.

I’m half-way through an article

Chinese Taking the World by Storm

when a sudden voice fills the room:

Let’s go out and play!, it says.

I know well where it came from.

I turn round, you’re fast asleep,

your faint-pink, chopped lips

briefly parted by something

dreamt, which shaped

that plunging sound.

The next morning you tiptoe

to the window, draw

the curtains to the bitter fact:

the urban roofs intact,

circumvented by snow.

December 25^th, 2011

© Branko M.

You Are Now Leaving Iraq

http://framework.latimes.com/2011/12/17/iraq-war/#/2

http://warnewsupdates.blogspot.com/2011/11/us-withdrawal-from-iraq-cartoon-pics.html

Saddam

Who would’ve thought that a conversation about poetry could give you an answer about weapons of mass destruction!

                                — Charles Duelfer, CIA, in National Geographic: Interrogating Saddam (2010)

Iraq, the country he ruled and ruled

as his ‘personal torture chamber’,

has scaled down to a dim prison cell –

his personal torture chamber.

Here, as a former ruler of Iraq,

here he lives on borrowed time,

is brought meals twice a day

is allowed to read books

is lent an ear to his war poetry.

But they are not interested in his poetry.

They are desperate to wring out

a couple of answers from him. Just a couple.

A simple yes or no would do.

Are there weapons under the Iraqi sand?

Is he friends with the sectarians?

He keeps shtum. He keeps reading,

keeps writing his war poetry.

The interrogator tries to win his trust.

He does. George Piro befriends him.

He even renounces a hunger strike for George’s sake.

But still he keeps shtum. And writes poetry

no one is interested in.

The weeks and months wear on.

The time is running out. Under pressure,

under immense pressure,

George Piro finally breaks down

and decides to pay attention to his poetry:

his writing style, his use of metaphor.

It is a metaphor of rifles and swords –

a figure of speech that he used

to scare off the hostile neighbour –

which brings on the truth, yet not a pardon.

It makes the world pause to think:

what if he never made that speech,

what if he didn’t have

‘a very unique way of writing’?

© Branko Manojlovic, 2011

The Night Hitch Died

I am not making this up. Friday night I dream I am in this large farmhouse kitchen, a bicolour cat in my arms. She is old and ailing. I think she is dying. I place her inside a wicker basket then completely cover it with a white hand-crochet lace. I place the basket on the kitchen cupboard. I am satisfied the moggy will die peacefully in here. I turn round to find Christopher Hitchens sitting at the dining table, legs crossed, a glass of what might be bourbon in his hand, lost in thought. I don’t think he says much, if anything.

A few days pass. Or perhaps weeks. In dreams they can do. I am back in the same kitchen after being away god knows where. Maybe just round the corner tending on sheep and pigs. I notice the basket is still sitting on the cupboard, covered with the same crochet lace. I walk over and remove the cover. The cat is still in there, barely alive. Fur dilapidated. One eye closed. She is breathing. I am instantly overcome by guilt. In dreams one can be. I pick the feline up and try to force-feed her milk but she coughs it all out. Then I notice Hitch, sitting at the table in the same disinterested way as before. This time Hitch talks, says something, but I now forget what. Maybe he jokes about the cat, how it always has been a fussy eater. Maybe he says how death is overrated. At this point the dream starts slipping away. I struggle to stay inside. In vain: as the sunrays tickle my eyelids Hitch seems to have had enough. I think I can just catch him getting off his chair and slowly walking out of the room, into the morning brightness.

A Find

Imagine you have walked numerous times past a parking lot near your home for the past six or seven years. Just cars, cars and empty spaces. How boring. Then, one cloudy Saturday morning, on your way to a nearby restaurant, you notice something is different, strange. You realize the car park isn’t there any more. Instead, there is a fence which looks it has sprung up overnight. Suddenly your curiosity is awoken and you take interest. You stop by this new fence, and raise yourself up on your toes to take a better look (you don’t believe you are actually doing this).

The sight, however, is totally unexpected: the cars are gone, the car park is no more. The tarmac itself skimmed off from the surface of the earth like fat from the cooking liquid. All that’s left is the brown patch of earth which has somehow extended to the size of a football pitch. You can even see a few people milling about, apparently taking photos (!). As far as you can make out there is nothing to take snaps of, apart from the flat, square blocks of land, a few lunar-like ‘craters’ and a few longish trenches that give the place some sort of coherence. You must find out what the hell’s going on. You walk round the long fence until you reach a white tent which has been placed at the improvised entrance of what must be, as you begin to suspect, a brand-new archeological site. Soon enough you are handed an A3 size paper with the whole detailed explanation. Alas, you are unable to read the characters, and you do not speak their language very well. So you take a walk around the site, you take a photo or two and when, finally, your curiosity gets the better of you, you start looking for someone to speak to. The choices are limited. You turn to a couple of elderly gentlemen whose animated conversation and their outer appearance – tweed jackets, specs, rucksacks – leads you to suspect they could be knowledgeable or even speak English. As it turns out, you are right as far as their familiarity with the goings on. They tell you in their language (you ask them to speak very slowly) the place has been found to be a thousand-year-old settlement, or rather a group of houses which used to be part of an affluent neighbourhood in the ancient city of Heian-kyō.

The city in question, of course, is present day Kyōto. The Saturday in question is yesterday, December 10^th, 2011. The patch of land does exist and has been dug up apparently by the students from the Bunkyo university. Its building is soon to be erected on the very spot (imagine the conservationists canvassing against it and collecting signatures for an ill-fated petition). The site, as my photo attests, is nothing to write home about, yet it should look remarkable to people who have lived for years in the neighbourhood. It is rather exhilarating to know that one thousand years ago here existed a community of aristocrats, and imagine their powdered faces and blackened teeth, their painted eyebrows, their shiny black hair, their multi-layered robes displaying seasonal colours. Imagine walking along a narrow Heian street in the moonlight, and sighting a woman who, having nothing better to do, is watching the shadow of a pine branch, imbued with the sweet futility of existence. 

            A woodblock print from 'One Hundred Aspects of the Moon' by Yoshitoshi

P.S. Today, Sunday, the site is already off-limits! Talk about the world of impermanence.

Socrates vs Socrates

As of yesterday, December 5^th, 2011, if you googled ‘Death of Socrates’ the top couple of results would not be about the famous Greek, but that of a Brazilian football hero: Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira. For those of us who grew up in the early 80s playing footy in the park or the nearest parking lot, the mention of Brazilian Socrates inevitably brings back memories of one irretrievably lost sporting era when football (and most other sports) could indeed be a beautiful game, when creativity on the pitch and loyalty to clubs and fans came before financial gain. Just watch the Brazilian side on youtube at the two World Cups – Spain ’82 and Mexico ’86 respectively – the improvisation, the risk-taking, the ball-control, the whole team one well-oiled machine made up of free-spirited, individual talent. Mind you, not as individualistic as that Greek team in Monty Python’s Philosophy Football sketch (in which Socrates of all philosophers scores with that masterly diving header!).

Little did we know, those of us living outside of Brazil, that Socrates the footballer (also a qualified medical doctor) was politically active, playing a very prominent role in dismantling the Brazilian military regime, which eventually collapsed in 1985, and helping to bring in democracy and prosperity to the masses. This he did by forming the Corinthian Democracy Movement in the early 80s with the aim of spreading the powers of majority rule:

"Corinthians were a superb side at the time, winning the Sao Paulo state championship in 1982 and 1983, and their blend of stylish, attacking football married with the political campaigning of Socrates and his colleagues captured the imagination of many. To spread their message the Corinthians Democracy Movement emblazoned the clubs kits with political slogans on match days, and huge pro-democracy banners were erected at their Pacaembu stadium. The movement also attracted the support of artists and intellectuals, as the political left latched onto the power of football in spreading the message for change. In 1982, despite warnings from the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) not to interfere in political issues, the Corinthians Democracy Movement agreed that the club would take to the field in shirts bearing the slogan “Vote on the Fifteenth”, urging Brazilian citizens to make their voice heard in the upcoming elections."

You can read the informative article in full here: http://fiveinmidfield.com/2011/03/27/socrates-and-the-corinthians-democracy-movement-how-football-helped-to-change-a-country/

So, what do two Socrateses, the Athenian and the Brazilian, apart from their name, have in common? A few parallels (however historically unverifiable): both men were physically strong and vigorous; both were courageous – the Athenian as a hoplite war veteran, the Brazilian as a political activist as well as the on-pitch adventurer; both strove towards achieving a fairer society, albeit by the apparently opposing, or at least different, means – the Greek had issues with the Athenian democracy of his time, mistrusted the majority rule (paradoxically considered as probably the first ‘free-speech martyr’) and was rather concerned with the moral and intellectual betterment, ‘welfare of the souls’, of his fellow citizens, whereas the Brazilian Socrates was a champion of the poor and the underprivileged; and judging by their actions, both men in their final hour faced death without much fear or regret: the Greek accepting, even welcoming, the death sentence, the Brazilian apparently a victim of his bohemian lifestyle. Whatever the parallels, straight or reverse, both men, as poet Kathy Evans Bush might say, acted like human beings. Curiously enough, she takes another Greek, Nestor, ‘the grandfatherly blabbermouth’, when she cooks up a poem from Nestor’s ‘point of view’ about yet another athlete (a coincidence?), LeBron James. The poem is called ‘The Iliad’, and the final lines go

Pro teams used to practice in
The gym where I taught high school.
Chamberlain, Chet Walker, Jerry West,
I saw them all up close and in truth
The only one who acted like a human
Being was Tom Boerwinkle so let's have
A poem contest for the man from Tennessee!

[http://baroqueinhackney.com]

In Memoriam: Petar Kralj (1941-2011)

Petar Kralj (1941-2011), that splendid figure of Yugoslav and Serbian theatre and film, is no longer with us. Who knows, by now he might have arrived at the Elysium café and joined his ex-Yugoslav thespian friends, feeding them the latest news from the old country. Unassuming as they come, Kralj was of that rare artistic breed who was able to project his private, almost tangible timidity and modesty into his roles, his sad azure eyes adding depth and a wistful dimension to his characters. Petar achieved one of his most memorable roles – and there were quite a few – in the film ‘Poseban Tretman’ a.k.a. ‘Special Treatment’ a.k.a. ‘What is it that attracts a human being to drink?’ (1980). Here he plays a failed actor, now an alcoholic convalescent who, as part of a travelling troupe, performs instructive sketches for the benefit of local communities. The following clip contains two great scenes. The first takes place at a restaurant where a snooty doctor, played by Ljuba Tadic, is lecturing an old man on ethics and integrity, while flirting with a blonde across the table (Milena Dravić, who that year won Palme d’Or for best supporting actress). The second scene has Petar Kralj stuttering Shakespeare (in Serbian!) while sitting on top of a cabinet, holding a carton of natural yoghurt. With English subtitles. 

My tribute for the wonderful man and artist. Click for better view: