future dysTokyo
we made zombies, clever us!
they’ll be our friends. Wrong.

Overhead, FA-18 Hornet flying low, sunny day, glints off the tail fins, disappears into the glare.  Roar of engines.  Something flutters earthwards — small — paper — coloured — rectangular — currency — unfamilar — lands in a car park.  Cyclone wire fence.  Climb it, ignore warning signs Don’t Go Here Commonwealth Of Somewhere: nobody’s around, curiosity wins.  Under a car, Caroline Chisolm’s sorriso sfumato darts out over a weave of orange and magenta: the old $5.

Holding a new one for comparison (HM the Q outwardly more dour, but a sly twinkle in her eyes). Frays, watermarks, fishscale patterns, a swashbuckling typeface; small, pink, microprinting, geometry.  Both insubstantial, both invested with obligation and stories and symbols of a place and time, as remote and as shared as those in ochre inscribed into the mountains.

The owner of the note, blue flight suit, friendly eyes, comes past improbably soon: in town for the air show, local hospitality extending to a trailer in the grounds (hats off indoors all the same); an old suitcase with obsolete currency “sort of an heirloom,” politely disguised smirks at the shiny plastic note and the terse monarch; wry, warm respect of a traveller far from home.

Ruling out some common words (the and of, etc) and sorting the words used in the last three inauguration addresses by their frequency produces an odd and distinctive poetry.  President Obama’s speech yesterday suggests the future, destiny and hope; President Bush’s 2005 address is directed to righteousness and justice, and the 2001 piece is, if you’ll grant me the liberty, mostly waffle.

Method: strip punctuation and “’s”, arrange descending by f=count(word(this speech))/avg(word(3 speeches)).  Original words taken from whitehouse.gov

obama 2009

you can nation new America every must than been world people Less let time work common now today cannot too know day more God generation only spirit was Nor power long before them come end greater men peace seek things through up women words hard meet crisis far whether freedom I your Americans courage ideals life some history many government hope just children generations most nations ourselves force future small Where across earth economy forward oath old over between care journey last man may out upon carried father jobs moment off once prosperity question Rather say shall short were country liberty one free promise American good make never united Yet find My birth faith purpose schools service stand also build did even task trust way without bless duties health still success thank use well afford ambitions begin blood challenges child done each enduring extend fear feed founding friend knowledge meaning minds passed prosperous remember then true war wealth again age answer back better big brave calls charter confidence conflict defence earned era face faced fail false forth gift given greatness grows hours icy light like lines longer lower market met might mutual nothing often part path planet play remain restore something storms stronger take taken throughout travelled understand understood virtue waters West why willing willingness winter workers year

bush 2005

freedom America your you every liberty one own nation I country Americans world can must know time work people day free seen citizens cause rights human tyranny life long some character great President united choice justice States fire than more now power today ideals before history good hope just live make find dignity force society years did fellow security task always another came determined goal governments honour ideal others rule serve defended excuse institutions questions courage promise American cannot generation them Yet come generations most My nations best duty future men stand women words also believe earth forward leaders lives other without accept advance after decent depends duties give Instead love move quiet success though use act borders bring chosen defined democratic enemies few habits hatred help idealism Independence larger law necessary need progress raise relies toward unite abandon accepted anew arms deepest ending fulfil influence making mercy millions oppression ownership permanent proclaimed resentment same selfgovernment soul speaks standards sustained value whole witnessed

bush 2001

story America nation I country citizens can every must freedom you Americans know new common courage many promise never his if time work more power ideals character American government live Yet children best duty public purpose beyond civility sometimes your world life some God history good great make President spirit was justice My ourselves birth faith schools service small Where lives deep defend lead place principles responsibility times affirm called commitment compassion everyone day than now own today been long before cause hope just only them united choice find generations most nations dignity society stand things through years believe build economy even leaders old other over trust way after ask bless does interest interests love see thank though against call century civil Clinton commitments communities conscience democracy humanity much pass pledge show speak storm values acts angel became challenge community directs follow generous grand honored important Jefferson laws poverty problems rides share simple stakes strong whirlwind

two men, one a skater with baggy shorts and dreadlocks, the other a retiree in plus fours and a polo shirt, were doing tai chi together with fans in the park this morning.  Yesterday, it was two middle-aged men in sneakers doing kendo.

It was in October, the sweltering haze of summer had lifted, I’d started opening my window to let in the breeze at night. The view wasn’t bad – bluish forested mountains layered up, fading into the sky; it wasn’t worth drawing the shoji screens as they didn’t block out the morning sun that bounced in at 7, refusing to let anyone sleep. Cool, bright mornings are the best – when I had time, I’d take a hike up Takaosan, two stops down the line. Autumn brought drifts of elderly couples with shiny new boots and walking poles down to our neck of the woods, bright-eyed on the first train, eager to see the orange and red autumn leaves; in the afternoons, they’d be heading back to Shinjuku, nodding off to sleep on each other’s shoulders.

This morning I’d decided to air everything, as it was the first clear day in a week, and had started unbuttoning all the assorted futon and quilt covers, when I noticed something new above the power lines and beyond the blue hills – white and craggy and distant; massive, elegant, commanding.

Fuji.

I dropped the futons and headed out to the balcony, awed. The haze was still there, enough to make it seem like it was still floating in from the ocean, or another world. Fuji. This icon I’d seen in any number of woodcuts and photographs, looming over the horizon like an extra moon rising.

I think I grabbed my camera, maybe I finished the washing, I’m not sure, but from that moment, Fuji was in my head wherever I was in Tokyo. It started the day by flashing pink and orange, then brilliant white as the sun rose; on the train to work it sat daintily framed in the window of the door to the driver’s cabin. Crossing the Tama river, the forested hills moved out of the way, and it filled the background with snowy white and ash-black, dwarfing the skyscrapers in our town.

It’s odd – Fuji is not a beautiful mountain as such. Even leaving aside its next (overdue) eruption, which may well destroy Tokyo, it’s not in the same club as the Matterhorn or Uluru – it’s too big, too primordial, too triangular. When you see an image of it, it’s almost never of Fuji alone: it’s Fuji’s slope in a cloudscape, Fuji’s snowy winter coat against sakura in spring, Fuji standing above the shimmering reflection in Kawaguchiko, stately. Wherever I took a photo, it was there: sometimes you could see it, filling half the frame with its northern shoulder, sometimes peeking over a 50– storey building, sometimes just its massive presence, behind you. Fuji is like a framing element, its presence always felt, as if by gravity rather than vision, everything else aligns itself, falling into orbit, standing with respect to Fuji.

Loving you is like this: not always in the foreground, not even always visible, but a frame in which everything else is aligned. I’m not yours evenings and weekends, I am yours all the time, in your orbit, feeling your presence, through the haze and the hills.

The stairs in front of my office are weird.

They’re about a metre deep and a normal step’s height, but they break with the well-established principle that you ought to be able to climb stairs without needing a diagram. Apparently some dude figured out how long and high each step should be in 1672, and everyone’s pretty much stuck to that since.

With the stairs raked so flat and each step so long, getting up and down them means developing a Quasimodo sort of affectation, dragging one leg behind you every third step, taking little rests to even yourself out, zigzagging to match up the distances. Or you can climb a stair every other stride, which requires giant goose-steps, leaving you with a sense of diminished dignity and the distinct feeling that one of your legs has somehow become longer than the other. The best way is to get it over with quickly, run straight towards the giant glass doors, then wait, panting and sweating as they ponderously draw open.

I wonder whether the choice of this design was a conscious departure from that rather antique guide, or whether the ergonomics of something as straightforward and complex as a staircase can escape whoever it is that designs these spaces. It’s a small difference mathematically, the tolerances for safety standards are quite wide: within those limits, any amount of creativity should be possible. If it is deliberate, I wonder whether the intention was to make the transition from the outside world into the rarefied atmosphere above more gentle and scenic, easing us into the working day – or whether we’re supposed to be enthusiastically sprinting up them, cheerful and ready for the day ahead.

If it’s not intended, I imagine the architect waiting out the front with newcomers to the building, bemused at the Ministry of Silly Walks they’ve created: marketing execs limping, phone operators doing high-kicks, and ladies in Alannah Hill and heels taking a run-up to charge the front door.

The microcosm of intrusions into the sky – chimneys, flues, antennae, trees, chevaux de frise, hold an endless fascination for me. It’s partly the diversity they enjoy: that rare abandonment of architectural ethnic separatism which Hundertwasser was so insistent on, but it’s also the way they are self-effacing. Chimneys seem to survive the ravages of architectural fashion somewhat better than trim and stucco by being double agents for demure tastefulness and blatant functionality.

The sky itself is endlessly fascinating. Today the sunset was one of those colours that cameras can’t reproduce – lilac and cornflower cutting into a cubic net of clouds. giving it luminescence and depth.

Something surprised me as I was clearing out my Gmail spam box today:

Look a bit closer.

Lovely Spam, wonderful Spam…

Oddly enough, when I’m making sure that the heuristics have correctly sifted the penis enlargements and Nigerian scams from emails from my mother, the furthest thing from my mind is a attempting to make reconstituted meat seem appetising.

In fact, I’d make the extraordinary claim that no-one in the history of electronic communication has been in the mood for a Spamwich recipe when they’ve been dealing with unsollicited communication.

I like the idea of AdSense – it is a bridge over some of the many ills of the advertising trade. Ads for me fall down in several important ways:

Who, me?

Ads which specify a non-me audience. Waste of everybody’s time: “Don’t you hate it when your pet poodle has erectile dysfunction brought on by non-organic all-in-one shampoo and conditioner?”

ADD

Ads designed to annoy you into paying attention with shouting, flashing, or silly voices. I use Adblock, so if one of these gets my attention, I commit genocide on it and all its kin. Harder to do on TV, but everyone knows what the remote’s for.

Syllogism, Testimonial

Anyone selling a product on the strength that it improved someone’s life has an enormous burden of proof to shift. Anyone trying to make that claim while pretending that it’s unscripted and sponntaneous is never going to shift it.

Lying

Popular with governments, news organisations, companies big enough to bribe the other two, and sue anything else out of existence. Cigarettes are not good for you. Neither is sugar coated in vitamins, no matter how much of your RDI they make up.

Psychology

Trying to use the insecure bits of my brain as a double agent against me doesn’t work. No matter how many breasts you show me, I will not buy your tooth whitener. I will not buy your two-seater flat-four coupe. I will not buy your sunglasses. I will not buy your wrinkle cream. I will not buy your lifestyle soda, your leather furniture, your alcoholic beverage, television, automotive glazing, zit remedy, ceramic paver, mascara, term depost, deodorant,underpants, mobile telephone, prefabricated dwelling, or external digital storage posthumously designed by Ferdinand Porsche.

I am probably unusually contrary, but corporate slaves trying to enclose sales pitches in what they probably refer to as ’saying it in their language’ feels suspiciously like condescention. At best, it is a sad sort of imitation: the forty year old trying to be fly, widdit, tight. The rest of these errors are the result of generalisations about the audience which aren’t going to pay off if there’s any level of sophistication out there.

AdSense at least makes a decent effort to select ads relevant to what a person’s actively pursuing, which deals with a couple of these shortcomings. Using the content someone’s reading (presumably) voluntarily and spontaneously is a far better driver for finding out what they’re interested in than the crass assumptions that TV and press advertisers make: that the audience of a TV show is more likely to respond to ads for their ultra-shiny triple-turbomatic v12 or low-brow beer because the show is about building things with bricks. It’s the same kind of approach as when you’re browsing Web pages which sell space to a major-but-dumb agent like Fastclick, and find yourself looking at offers to 3NLARGE your P4NIS when trying to find the lyrics to that Beatles song. Perhaps the reader indeed would like a bigger p4nis – I’m sure it’s a common enough wish – but my feeling is the reader wants those lyrics and will look for 3nlargements somewhere else.

AdSense, despite having the advantage of not being a complete stab in the dark, has obviously got into the moisturised hands of the same bunch who would advertise anywhere it will attract an eyeball. Putting context-sensitive ads on a page which is by definition full of unwanted content gives you by-definition unwanted ads: an efficient way to Kovco the advertising message.

Melburnians don’t really know what to do with rain. I presume that’s because it never rains for longer than a few minutes at a time, just enough of a delay to fill in with an espresso or a bit of recreational shopping. Melburnians can’t handle wet weather gear like raincoats and umbrellas: they assume the umbrella is some sort of thinking-ahead badge of status, they walk through arcades and covered areas with them still raised, shoving the less prepared out of the way. In other parts of the world, there’s an etiquette for who raises and who lowers their umbrella, who steps onto the pavement, when and where to furl and shake the water off so it doesn’t ruin the carpet or anyone’s trousers. Here umbrella-users are like novices with chopsticks: all bravado and clumsiness.

Our urban uniform is wrongly characterised as being all black: it’s true that solid, dark colours are a feature of the landscape, but that’s because it’s often cold, and brightly-coloured, patterned overcoats are (1) expensive (2) horrific (3) hard to accessorise. Black, navy, brown, grey, red, beige are the standard winter colours anywhere; no difference here. What probably makes visitors from other states notice the winter chic is that the locals are used to the old girl blowing hot and cold: layers and coats are the smart bet when you don’t know whether it’s a blast furnace or Siberia round the next corner.

Twice a year the smart bet backfires. Bennett celebrates this every September or so, when a surprise hot day comes out of nowhere. After months of careful selection of thermals, coats, scarves, a bit of sunshine has us abandoning discretion for the valour of showing ankles, arms and the inner layers that weren’t meant to be seen – T-shirts of bands nobody could possibly still like, washer-thinned polo shirts in faded colours, holey singlets, tiny tank tops, low-cut comfortable things. It appeals to Bennett because of the number of girls who don’t wear a bra under the winter rags. I like it for the way it strips away the pretence of clothes selected for appearance, and shows the clothes that are actually loved.

Down the other end of the year, a sudden cold blast empties streets and fills cafes with customers, orders for hot chocolate and a sense of being united by the capriciousness of the skies.

I like the way weather shapes the character of a people: Japan is the land of umbrella stands with locks, Darwin is a city without coat-hooks, Melbourne is the city of men with hands in pockets, girls with jackets tied around waists, and the mugginess and noise and cameraderie of a cafe crowded with refugees from the rain.

Suzy Shakespeare

Originally uploaded by OsakaBen.

Suzy singing in the final at the Melbourne Concert Hall on the 1st November. She was brilliant, but didn’t end up with the prize.