A weekend of halcyon days in the sun gone, a few tunes should be put on.
A few songs to put a person through an hour or so, to foment some small rebellion among the androids, to encourage a rising up against the civilized worm. Give the human race a try, get back to the original heart. Use the satellites in ways never intended- to truly connect to someone else. Do your part to see that you’re not the last human being left standing; it does no good to be a Robinson Crusoe among the fully devolved.
Somebody do something today. Everyone, do something today.
Shoko Nakahara stars in Yoshihiro Nishimura’s 2008 tour-de-abattoir Tokyo Gore Police (Tokyo Zankoku Keisatsu) as the hard-nosed avenger of decency without mercy Ruka. Preternaturally calm, dangerously certain of her purpose and her use of the katana in the black and white battle between criminal indecency and the directives of the privatized Tokyo Police Corporation, Ruka is a little death fashionably decked out in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings, the call-girl of justice tossing the most hardened criminals into the icy salad of divine retribution.
Japan’s police and self-defense forces were privatized during Ruka’s youth under the auspices of a single draconian for-profit agency whose shock troops resemble something between armored, war-ready samurai and Darth Vader, a change in course in society the initial contestation of which has been deliberately buried in the past by those powers who stood to profit most from it.
This proves to be a crucial detail in the development of Ruka’s life, for the Terry Gilliam-esque former tracheotomy patient wearing the horned helmet with the external car stereo speaker affixed to his badged armor is the man who, as chief of police, stood to gain the most power from disposing of the more socially-minded cop leading the privatization opposition- Ruka’s father. That this was done before the impressionable eyes of this girl he then raised among the police as his daughter, that the assassin he hired to clear the field of his opposition and publicly executed was the father of a brilliant genetic engineer studying the heredity of criminality is key- it is the self-serving action that at once created a ronin state of arbitrarily unchecked police aggression in the service of order and the same moment forged that state’s arch-enemy, the Key Man. It also birthed the one warrior who would be the undoing of the whole system.
Key man is the creator of a parasitic virus culled from the DNA of the world’s most notorious serial killers, a key-shaped tumor that causes any wound inflicted on the infected to mutate into a deadly weapon. During the movie’s course of corpse production from conflict to resolution, Penes, pudenda, breasts, bellybuttons, really all the best stuff is transformed into a high-pressure blood-hosing instrument of gore. These augmented augerers hosting the mutation-inducing tumors of anti-humanity are dubbed “engineers.”
When the police declare an all-out war on the population in an attempt to eliminate the engineers, the truth, that the chief hired the man who killed her father, is revealed to a virus-infected Ruka. She single-handedly wipes out the police force and takes her revenge on the man who raised her, even as he flies about the room enhanced by drugs that cause gravity-defying jets of blood to fire from the stumps of his legs.
I should mention that, marring the progress of the movie is a scene of anti-Chinese nationalism that really doesn’t add anything to the story, leaving me with a bad taste on the iron-coated walls of my mouth.
The film is intercut with bizarre and hilarious PSAs for the new privatized police force, the reduction of workplace hara-kiri, cute accessory box-knifes for high-school aged cutter gyaru, and swords advertised for the same purpose on a “Call Now!” basis, all while this vixen of an S/M Marilyn perfectly amputated from her Norma Jean, a cross between a DJ and a police dispatcher, broadcasts whilst dancing to an amazing Japanese rock soundtrack her frenzied bloodthirsty dispatches.
For blood or for pizza, the axes swing when she sings.
I held him for the first time after he was born and walked him about. Beneath the mass of black curls atop his head, his big black eyes reminded me of my own, of photographs of my own, taken in the days and hours after my own birth.
He was moving his lips, and I was watching him work wordlessly when very clearly I understood him to say, “Can I have a puppy?”
My first fatherly decree would be that my son would have a dog.
“Yes, you can have a puppy.”
Someone else in that dream room laughed good-naturedly. They hadn’t heard my son’s first words to me, they were touched by what they thought was my pantomime of fatherhood.
I walked with him a bit more in silence and he asked me, “What is worrying you?”
In dreams the whole world is your own mind, and your worries cut true figures with little effort, so I asked him, because the world is the place that it is,
“Was I right to bring you into this world?”
It was almost with a laugh that he said, “Old friend, you have never been able to remember or understand the passing of 2,000 years. I’m happy to see you again.”
It’s true. In my dream-mind I had that waking-world irked struggle with familiarity that always surrenders to affability and further investigation. I knew my son, and I knew I should know my son. But, then again, I didn’t. I was simply happy.
Nature, it is said, abhors a vaccuum. As we wake daily older into our ever more vanilla lives, hypermediated and corralled by deadlines and an over-influx of topical information that we can make neither heads nor tails of, an influx whose surfeit is too total to help us to tackle and reshape the world of late humanism we are plunged in, a soon-to-be vestigial organ of that nearly obsolete humanity of ours is sounding the aether for fellow monsters.
It’s a bit of us now so tenuously real that our children will probably be born without it. For us, it still calls out a tiny, unanswered S.O.S. to the parent notion to Wonder; the Terrible- the old, silent spirit guide to memory. It drops stones into wells and listens to see if that well has really emptied, to suss whether we can still wake the Terrible while still endlessly hitting the send button, calling meetings, talking using words that carry no meaning.
We are each morning watching the light crawl frightened as roaches across the ceilings, running photon by photon out the windows and out of the skies as though called back at the end of a job. They are clearing the aisles at the end of poetry and politics, food and camaraderie. We are married and eking out our days in companionship with our carpal tunnel syndrome, relinquishing reflection and recall to search engines and catch-phrase exhibitionism.
Thank the old gods that Deerhunter, amidst everything that is deadening and normal, in the face of everything that is forgetting and frivolous, is weird and still playing. They are monsters still in the gulf of an uncrossably wide vaccuum of spent humanity.
Having danced last night to Love is All, tickets to which I received free of charge by responding to a Time Out New York ticket giveaway blog post, I am thankful that I sweat as much as I did. I think it did something to ameliorate the hangorative effects of all last night’s imbibing.
I don’t know anything about Love is All, nor do I know anything about its members’ previous band, Girlfriendo. The tickets were free and I was by myself and the pace of the show was enough to keep me on my toes. Sometimes, very rarely, that’s all I ask.
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