“Hiiragi” by Do As Infinity: “Bokutachi wa ayamachi o okasu. Bokutachi wa sugu ni tachitomaru. Sasai na koishi ni sae mo tsumazuite. Dareka no kotoba o shinji dareka no te no naka ni iru. Saigo wa hitori na no ni…” [Japanese] “We all make mistakes. We all come to sudden stops. Even a small stone could make us trip. We believe in someone else’s words, in someone else’s hands, though in the end we’re alone…”

She makes me smile. She makes me feel alive. When I hold her in my arms, she makes my heart beat faster. We make sweet music together. Yes, I went back to London on Friday night to be reunited with the love of my life and if you didn’t already know, the current love of my life is of course, my guitar. I didn’t bring her with me when I moved into my new place because my voice was croaky. Besides, when I’m ephemerally ravaged by virii, I am hardly in the mood for song. I knew I would return to London a couple of weeks later anyway, so I would bide my time and see if I withdrew from lack of contact with her. I found out two days into my stay that I missed her very much so. This absence was only helped by my chesty cough, which meant that even if my guitar was with me and I wanted to sing, my raspy voice would have only made for a successful period of doing Barry White covers. Like a bad rumour, the cough stuck around longer than anyone would like. Two weeks(!) and that’s pretty long by my white blood cell standards. But it’s gone now and I’m glad my old voice is restored. Okay, not that glad because I wish it could have been replaced with a better one.

The thin walls in the house meant that my guitar’s arrival would be met with mixed feelings from the housies (i.e. the housemates, as opposed to roomies for roommates), especially because it’s been established that I am the last one to crash out and retire at night (I have a habit of singing before I sleep). The acoustics in my room are also fairly good, sending rogue reverberations through the room like it was a poor man’s church. On the first day I played a little set for Sav consisting of a freshly composed song, an Our Lady Peace cover, a Coldplay cover and a David Gray cover. Before you proceed to attack my barely existing credibility with a barrage of head shakes and finger wags, let me just state for the record that I am not a David Gray fan at all, but his one song “Babylon” is a great acoustic solo strummer. More than anything, I like it for its one line in the chorus where the last words in two consecutive lines are sung so they seemingly rhyme. These two words aren’t meant to rhyme when spoken, but do so to please the song. I’m not sure if there’s a technical term in the industry for this technique, but case in point: “If you want it, come and get it, crying out loud. The love that I was giving you was never in doubt” (the word “doubt” is sung to rhyme with “loud”).

I used to be fairly coy when it came to performing in front of people, but a while ago I made an agreement with myself that I would live an unabashed musical life, no longer hindered by such things as nerves. I’ve been exercising my voice more frequently (for the past year or so it’s been on a daily basis) and over the years I’ve progressed from humming songs to actually singing them whilst laying down their chords on the guitar. I am now definitely way more comfortable with my voice, because I’ve accepted defeat through the realisation that I’ll forever be a guy with an octave problem. I can sing in tune but will be limited to keys that couldn’t be considered high, for eternity. So, it sucks that I won’t be able to pull off the ballads the way I’d like to, but on the plus side nearly every song I do sounds like an indie/alternative cover, which is good if you like indie/alternative. It just so happens, I do.

I’ve noticed that the days fly by when you live by the sea. In between waking and sleeping I really don’t know where the time goes. I imagine before the new day starts, a large compactor of time appears and mops up all the stray Tachyons before disappearing from whence it came. They say time and tide wait for no man, but what if behind our backs, time and tide had formed an allegiance and plotted to rob man of his precious Earthly stay? A large rock striking Earth and causing it to spin on its axis slower would be handy right about now. If such a thing was set to happen, knowing my luck, they’d probably get Bruce Willis up there to stop it, with some help from twelve monkeys and a kid that sees dead people. From one Bruce to another, I wonder if anyone else spotted the following. The Incredible Hulk was the alter-ego of Bruce Banner. We all know that, especially if we saw the recent remake by Ang Lee. I was a big fan of the original films and the TV series with Bill Bixby. Okay, I don’t know how I failed to spot this sooner (before Sanje pointed it out), but in the new film he’s Bruce Banner. In the comics he’s also Bruce Banner, but in the TV show he’s David Bruce Banner. “Do you know why they called him David instead of Bruce?” I asked Sanje, innocently. “He was a superhero so he had to have a tough sounding name. Back then, they didn’t have hard guys like Bruce Willis. Back then, all guys named Bruce were Nancy boys,” he replied. Good answer!

Anyway, I digress. Bring on the meteorite the size of Texas. Bring on the thirty hour day! It would give me the luxury of time currently needed to think and make order of the fuzzy rows of static code in my head, brought on by my project at work. You surely know the feeling of having so much information pushed into your head in such a short time that your brain feels bloated. You could shake your head as perniciously as you want, but there wouldn’t be a single sound of a rattle, no siree. There’s so much floating around in the soup that I’m sure if you hooked electrodes up to my brain, it could provide a day’s worth of electricity for a small Indian village. Failing that, hooking my brain up to a chimpanzee with typing skills would be a better alternative, because this way I could compose my journal entries without the requirement of finger-lifting. I still have all the motivation in the world. I just don’t have all the time in the world, Mr Armstrong.

So much has happened since the weekend and every evening I attempted to write up the story so far, but this week saw a lot of work from the office hitch-hiking on my back when I made my way home. Like a monkey, it straddled my back, almost like payback from knowing how much pleasure I derived from mooching off my workplace’s fat internet connection. When I came back from London I was sure to pack a few extra floppy disks so now via the magic of disk spanning, I am able to bring some music back home with me each day. Free music is the r0×0r5, y0!

It’s also nice to have a routine again. It’s nice to have to be at a certain place at a certain time. It’s nice to have a goal that is actually visible before the horizon, but possibly the best part is being able to live like a student again. I never lived away from home when I attended University so this new student-like lifestyle rocks my world. For all intents and purposes, this is student life, with the only really noticeable difference being that I am not eligible for the benefits that an NUS (students’ union) card brings. The measure of a good thing is how much you miss it in its absence and how I miss my whimsical multiple discount purchases at HMV and Waterstone’s. Now I find myself feeling sixteen years old again, in great need of a fake student ID. The kids nowadays have it easy thanks to some guy named Adobe. In my day we had to get creative or have relevant contacts to obtain age-enhancing papers. Oh, to reap the benefits of a card that tenderises my bank account. I’d have to be sensible though. I wouldn’t use mine to get into clubs. I’d use it to buy booze books.

On Sunday, Sav’s Londoner pal, Mash, came down and we took a trip to the Marina and the pier. We had a look around the cluster of stores residing beside the seafront and I experienced the insides of once secret shops that provoked gag reactions from my wallet. With no more than trace signs of willpower, it would have been too easy for anyone to indulge in the cool offerings of these shops. One shop in particular sold designer and retro merchandise in the form of vases, arty trinkets, gadgets and kitchen tools. I am so tempted to go back there and give my credit card grief, because everyone knows how much I am in dire need of wall and door hanging type ornament thingumies. ^_^

Someone had turned around the billboard sign for the local Moshi Moshi sushi bar in the street so that its arrow pointed in the opposite direction to its location, which meant we had to stroll around for fifteen minutes trying to find it. I’d heard great things about it and being voted one of the top ten places to eat in Britain by a credible left-wing publication, it had to be fairly decent. Heck, if it’s good enough for the Prime Minister, it’s good enough for me. I was expecting to find it inside a building complex and was pleasantly surprised to find it was a little autonomous hut situated in the middle of an open area. The decor was nice and it was very Japanese for a city kaiten (conveyor belt) sushi place. We realised we hit the jackpot when upon being shown to seats at the bar by our overly enthusiastic waitress that Sunday was Happy Day (i.e. Happy Hour all day), where every plate on the conveyor was £1.50. This meant cheap unagi (eel), tako (octopus) and ikura (salmon roe). Huzzah, with a capital H, indeed! I honestly think I could have sat there all day accumulating stacks of plates (not to mention stacks of zeroes on the end of the bill) so after stomach levels hit full, we decided to leave with our hands over our eyes so we would not be distracted by the food in motion on the belts. The first few times were unsuccessful with Sav being held to his seat by teriyaki chicken yakitori appearing and I myself was bound to my chair when my eyes caught sight of prawn tempura rolls. The only logical way to resolve this situation was to pick up dessert, effectively get closure on the meal, then get the hell outta there. We chomped down red bean mochi and made a hasty exit towards dessert number two, in the form of fresh donuts from the pier.

To this day I’m still trying to convince Sav to get a job at that sushi place, as part of my masterplan to eat sushi daily. He did have a good argument though.

Sav: If I’m working here all the time, what do I do about me learning Java?
Me: Well, I’d hang out at the sushi bar and slip you snippets of code in between mouthfuls of unagi and sips of sake.
S: That’s not going to work.
M: We could bring the laptop to the bar and face it your way so that you could write code in between slicing my exotic California rolls. It will work out great.
S: I dunno.
M: And if you’re a sushi chef, you’d get hit on by girls all the time, asking you to demonstrate how skillful you are with your hands.
S: I’ll get an application form.

Earlier in the day, Mash drove us down to the Marina. It was my first time down there and it was an amazing site, because they were like a self-sufficient village down there. They had a supermarket, cinema, loads of restaurants, an ice rink, a bowling alley, a leisure centre and a gym. They even had a casino! There were also masses of boats moored up in the port and I thought to myself how great it must be to be able to change your postcode on a whim.

I really ought to get a Dictaphone to record all the asinine stuff we talk about. A lot of it is silly, but we do touch on serious topics and issues too. More often than not it starts out serious and then takes a dive into the pits of inanity. For example, one discussion we had was about how one should be taught from an early age to treat everyone fairly and nicely, but then that continued into a light-hearted discussion about how one should treat everyone nicely, especially the geeks because they’ll be the ones who’ll be running the country in the future (and there’s nothing worse than a geek scorned, especially if the geek is a woman). One other morsel of wisdom I shall be imparting to the younguns is to especially be nice to the geeky girls, because they’re the ones that everyone will be trying to date at University. I thought about this for a while and am now absolutely convinced that beauty queens burn out after high school and geeky girls become unrepentantly hot. If you asked all the top supermodels in the world what hobbies they got up to in high school, you’d be surprised how many of them took great pleasure in sewing, playing chess and writing software. ^_^

I was speaking to Sav the other day about the beauty of strangeness. We didn’t know each other before a few weeks ago but now we speak as though we’ve known each other for years. This is where the beauty of conversation lies; the ability to have a conversation with someone and be able to talk about the fundamental things again. Old words and memories are renewed as you recount how many siblings there are in your family, what your parents do for a living and what you did in University. All the while, you find yourself thinking “It feels like I’ve known you for years” and how often can you say that to those people you know? For me, it encapsulates the beauty in conversing with strangers and making a new connection. Bridging the gap between strangeness and familiarity is always a joy and I never understand it when people say “I’ve got enough friends. I don’t need any more.”

Speaking of the strangeness of conversation, I was finally able to see Lost in Translation on Monday. I tried to get tickets the previous Monday because Monday all day is Happy Day, but I was beaten to the draw by mobs of quick-moving students. It was playing at the local arthouse cinema, which happens to be the oldest continuously running cinema in the UK and is licensed, meaning you can take alcohol into the auditorium. I was watching a film sitting next to a beer guzzling white rasta with a South African accent. How often could I say that in London?

There’s not a great deal of dialogue in the film. Everything plays out like a fly-on-the-wall observation. We follow Bill Murray’s Bob and Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte through a metaphysical maze that makes redundant the words they have used and known all along. They find that words can only convey so much meaning. After all, gesticulation is one of the main tools used in driving the meaning behind the words home.

There’s much contentiousness to be found in unfamiliar surroundings because unfamiliar surroundings are conducive to the birth of discovery (and often adventure). It’s that amazing feeling of not knowing what is coming up ahead and to have things unfold in real time, only as soon as the light can hit your retina and so forth. Just like Bob and Charlotte, I got the feeling of being slightly lost the first time I set foot on Brighton’s streets. Okay, this is not a great comparison because Brighton is very much like London, a city I am familiar with, and Japan is the closest thing to another planet that one could find on Earth. In any case, being somewhere new has its own beauty. When I am in London, I am one of its people. As I stroll down Oxford Street, everything is familiar to me. Even the strangers I brush past are familiar to me, for I know where they’re from, where they’re going, what they do for a living and how they live their lives. I don’t really know these things, but being in a place I’m familiar with, I can second guess all the other people just by looking inwards. It feels like I know them. The people I encounter and I are all in the same city and the familiarity of the city means I can make comfortable assumptions about the people I meet there. Here in Brighton, things work differently. When I first arrived, I knew practically nobody. I didn’t know how its denizens lived nor which bus they caught to get into town. Despite this void in familiarity, I felt great pleasure immersing myself in its offerings and I continue to feel simple pleasure walking on its pavements. Nothing appears compartmentalised. The lines that separate the different stores, buildings and people are all blurred and blend into each other, unlike the all too discernable London. But that’s what it appears like to me; a part-time gregarious animal who likes to understand others as much as himself.

Bob and Charlotte experienced in Japan an extreme form of what I felt here. They were plucked from their familiar surroundings and juxtaposed to another completely different environment. You learn a lot about yourself when you suddenly become the odd one out, and the film followed the two as they attempt to ingratiate themselves with their surroundings, discovering more about the things they had always felt, or not felt as a by-product. In Charlotte’s case, she realised she didn’t know what to feel for her now husband. In Bob’s case, he realised that despite the dysfunction, he loves his family. All these thoughts are brought to the surface because when you’re being challenged, either by new surroundings or new conversation, your introspective jaunts are heightened. This is particularly true when you’re in the company of someone who seems tuned into the same frequencies. With such persons, time will become velveteen and flow. The person opposite you will follow your every thought and in the blink of an eye, your words become superfluous. The film didn’t feature that much dialogue, for the lingering shots of silence spoke volumes. By that point the characters are already inside our heads and at the same time we are already inside theirs; they have become a part of us. This made me think about the duality in the film’s title but I understand it as being this: No matter where you are, words can only convey so much meaning. Showing someone how you feel is more powerful than just telling someone how you feel. Language is bound by semantics, which differ from person to person. If you let go of the words and express your emotions with motions, then there is no barrier. Nothing will be lost in translation. After all, everyone knows the value of a frown, a wave, a handshake, a smile, a kiss.

All in all, Lost in Translation is a thought provoking bittersweet piece of cinema, filled to the brim with nuance. It’s a film that plays like a book, requiring opulent audience input to colourise and bring meaning to the parts that are left monochrome and vague. It’s also filled with some great music and it all seemed to fit in despite a serious lack of Japanese music, which is what one would expect to hear emanating from a film set in Japan. The music is largely soft, but toughens up appropriately for the Karaoke and Pachinko parlour scenes. It’s sweet and sad in the same gulp and pulls the shutters of perspective down on any of us who’ve suffered the burn of unrequited love. It reminds us that there does exist a kind of love that tugs at the heart strings more than unrequited love and that is forbidden love, i.e. love that is reciprocated but cannot be consummated due to propriety or impossibility of incidence. It’s the kind of connection that makes you feel sad, but at the same time, happy to have experienced. The film is in many ways like the sumptuous Hong Kong film, In the Mood For Love, and just like at the end where we will never know what Tony Leung’s character whispers into the hole at an ancient Angkor Wat confessional, we will never know what Bob whispers in Charlotte’s ear moments from the end. It’s better this way, because they’ve just spent an intimate number of hours together, open to everyone’s eyes and ears. They’ve earned their privacy for that moment. They’ve fleshed themselves out for us; they’ve done their part. Now we must do our part and finish the story for ourselves.

I’m tempted to go with the “They don’t pursue their feelings” ending over the “They’re going to give it a shot” ending, because it feels more right (and it’s rare that there’s ever a right time when a fifty year old dates a twenty year old, right?). I’ve read a few reviews and although I’ve explained myself as much as I care to, for those who are still in the shadows about the spirit of the film, here’s my quick take on it, inspired by the satirical Movie-A-Minute site: