3 August 2004
Ping Pong (the Japanese film based on the manga) did not seem that unusual a premise for a Japanese film at first. Of course the Japanese are obsessed with table tennis, the inattentive racist in my bonce said. The film picked me up – the scary end of level baddie for at least the first half of the film is Chinese. Refered to as China, this demon table tennis player is seen as being a natural just because he is Chinese.
As far as I am aware table tennis is no bigger than most other sports in Japan. There might be specialist table tennis dojo’s like the one shown in the film, but it could just be a fiction to help the films air of all pervasive table tennisdom. But beyond always being rather irritated by the game when I played it, there is something great about a long table tennis rally. The reaction speeds, the sound and fury. Ping Pong sometimes fluffs its actual table tennis scenes, possibly because the actors are not professionally ping pongers. But there are fast cutting scenes, probably computer generated balls in the later scenes where the zen of the little ball is illucidated.
Pete Baran in TMFD • No Comments
The Literary Mind by Mark Turner
A deceptively titled book. It’s about the nature of thought and grammar, and proposes that we invert the way we think about the origin of language, and more specifically the skeleton of concepts underlying language that we call grammar. While this theory is not without opponents (Chomsky-ites, chom-chom-chomskyites), neither is it uncontroversial, arising as it does from the developing programme of cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, Johnson, etc).
The inversion it invites is that the ‘will to story’ rather than being the apex of language is actually the very fundament of the language-using mind. Here ‘story’ is used very widely to encompass literary stories, parables or the more technical ‘image schema’ (I was going to call this review The Talent of The Parables, forgive me). Our story here, goes that our evolving brain has hit on a few formulas for extracting interesting information out of the world. These formulas or schemas are very basic ‘stories’ like “actor X causes Y”, and so the brain has carved out categories like “actors” and “causes” and built a way of describing the world using these concepts. And this is where the ‘grammar module’ of the brain may come from. There is quite a lengthy and persuasively simple explanation of the origin of “tense”.
I found it quite a waffle, as I’m used to a more technical way to explain theory, but that may attract more people than it alienates. I did like the constant use of literary examples, specifically to The One Thousand and One Nights, and it made me want to go and read that. Which is a recommendation in itself I suppose.
Alan in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
Ping Pong – not a film about the dodgiest of Rupert’s chums. Instead a Japanese film about table tennis. Based on a five book manga. That is a five book manga about table tennis. You know the way they say there are manga on every subject in Japan. Well Ping Pong proves it.
There is a suggestion that all sports films have the same plot. This is not true. Most have the same plot. Some occasionally allow the bad guys to win for a greater good, or as in Escape To Victory, the sport is really a side issue. But in most cases we have a hero to cheer for who will surmount all odds to win out in the end. Ping Pong is different, in as much as it slowly introduces us to a large number of characters and does not seem clear which of its protagonists is even the lead. Is it Smile – the ironically named ping pong natural, or Peco – his arrogant friend. You can tell this is based on a complex source novel, because right to the very end you do not know who is going to win.
Not many sports films (perhaps with the exception of Field Of Dreams) concern themselves too much with the philosophy of their sport, the philosophy of good sports playing. In the climatic match, the losing party starts smiling, \not because he is resigned but because he has realised he is part of the best game he will ever be in. The film stops to appreciate this too. Peco, his opponent, has one of the most irrepressible smiles I?ve seen in cinema – and the film earns its potentially over the top ending.
It is a film about table tennis. Based on a manga. Go see.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
BOOM! Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa is a thorough and often fascinating book which still ends up just slightly unsatisfying. He’s been criticised by some reviewers for too many digressions on topics whose connection to the volcano are real but not direct (the development of undersea cables, for instance, or the theory of plate tectonics). These sections do slow the book down but I was glad to have them: they built an impression of the author as an agreeable curator, a polymath who wanted to make sure everything that needed understanding was understood. In other words, it made me trust Winchester and his judgement.
On the other hand it’s apparent reading the book that he’s more at home with stories of geological heroism than human interest. He evokes the monstrous forces roiling beneath the island marvellously, but the human reaction to them is treated scrappily. It’s not that Winchester can’t sketch characters and events with aplomb; it’s that he seems unconcerned as to their fate – we rarely get told for sure whether any of the people we meet in the lead-up to the explosion survive it: the safety of his primary sources are all we can rely on. He also constantly mentions the scale of the Krakatoa explosion in the very long build-up to the event, but fumbles the climax – I had to check back and make sure that the latest “infernal sound” was actually the big one. Having spent so long stressing how the Krakatoa event was the first ‘global village’ news, there’s virtually nothing on global reaction, aid efforts, or the aftermath beyond its longer-term effects on Javanese Islam (and the adventures of a few naturalists).
It’s a very English science book in that sense: Winchester knows his material is spectacular but is constantly warring against the urge to be a showman. It doesn’t ruin his book – and a sensationalist account that didn’t give us all those facts would be worse – but Krakatoa isn’t as powerful as it could have been.
Tom in Proven By Science • No Comments
The publog has wanted to do something like the Onion AV Club’s survey of crap snack foods for quite some time. We can all be food scientists after all. Was the largest ingredient in Kola Rollerball’s really aluminium? Was their any food value to the outer casing of a flying saucer?
My favourite of this list is the Caco Chocolate Sandwich Cookie’s, which offers the warning on the side that they may contain traces of egg and milk. They’re cookies – I should bloody well hope so.
Pete Baran in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
I had heard a rumour that prawn cocktail was back on fashionable restaurant menus and yesterday I had it confirmed. I was having a business supper at Inn The Park, a wooden ‘British cafe’ at the swankier end of St. James’ Park. Cured salmon; steak; sucking pig; stuffed artichokes; skate; salads and – there it was, an £8 starter – prawn cocktail. Of course I ordered it. It was nice, too – not eight pounds nice but the dressing was tangy, the prawns fat and juicy, the whole experience oddly comforting even though I’d never eaten prawn cocktail as a child. Perhaps I’d seen my father have it in Berni Inns, or perhaps it’s an English race memory. To add to the faintly absurd 70s ambience we were drinking (a rather bland) rose wine.
Tom in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Well if no-one else is going to do it – WELCOME TO BLOG 7.
What is Blog 7? Well this month it is a Blog about London. Next month it is a blog about travel. And October? Well you will have to wait and see. The urge behind Blog 7 was simple, there are subjects that the FreakyTrigger writers want to write about which do not quite fit in the other blogs. They also don’t really justify a blog of their own. So how about a monthly blog, one which – like some stolen super spaceship – roams around the Universe of topics having glorious adventures.
Alright, someone when pissed said Blog 7 and the joke to the ridiculous sci-fi TV childen in us had to go for it.
So this month it is all about London. And if you want to contribute then send us a line on freakytrigger@gmail.com. London, the 242 most used word in the world according to Wordcount, and conicidentally this is the highest placement for any city or place on that list.
Pete Baran in Blog 7 • No Comments
Yesterday I was half-listening to the radio, when Jo Whiley started playing this thing she’d downloaded off the Internet. “Slash dot dash, slash dot com”, over and over again. It sounded really cheap, some joke MP3 knocked up by one of this lot, once you’d heard thirty seconds you’d heard it all. I couldn’t work out why Whiley had got it and why she seemed to find it so funny. It was on quite low in the office so I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she played a bit of Wire’s “Dot Dash” too – yesss, and? Then this morning she was playing it again – it sounded even worse, I couldn’t understand it, this joke hadn’t been that great once let alone twice.
And then it turned out to be the new Fatboy Slim single.
Which is at least quite a lot funnier.
Tom in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
Metafiction in Astro Boy
I’ve just read Astro Boy #14, which contains some of the most remarkable and untrammelled breaking of the traditional boundaries, not just of the comic artform but of any narrative form, that I’ve encountered. First we get a story from 1960, starting (I suspect this introductory segment may be a later preface) with Astro’s sister Uran visiting the strip’s creator, Osamu Tezuka, and his confession that he can’t recall how or why she first appeared. She is indignant, and he phones the other characters, getting a different origin account from each – one admitting that he can’t remember, but offering the version from the TV show. Uran gets furious and smashes up Tezuka’s apartment.
Even better is an incident in the 1958 story ‘Fortress Of The Centaurs’. The noble alien centaurs have escaped the gangsters trying to use them, and the story seems concluded, as no one knows where they are – then the gangsters find out. How? “Easy! We just turned the screws on Osamu Tezuka…” says the boss, and they go off to attack the aliens, one bystander remarking that “Only in a manga would a gang like this fire rockets!”
This is astonishingly uninhibited playfulness, which reminds me of the Greeks’ deus ex machina theatrical device and of some of Tristram Shandy (both surely more apt references than any self-conscious PoMo), but it’s also an instinctive move on Tezuka’s part to break the fourth wall, an anti-realism move he employs (always in formally different ways) in even his most serious and profound works (i’m thinking of his great masterpiece, Phoenix). It’s one of the reasons I love his work so much.
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
A LONDON SONGBOOK
The music London makes, and its relation to the city, has not been written about as much as you might think. Simon Reynolds’ excellent chapter on pirate radio in the UK edition of “Energy Flash”; the atmosphere of 70s London threaded through books like England’s Dreaming and Bass Culture; superb on-the-ground commentaries by a host of recent music writers and bloggers; but unless I’m being ignorant no full-length studies, no London equivalent of Hoskyns on LA or Haslam on Manchester. Maybe it’s undesirable, or impossible – surely one of the attractions of London culture is its patchwork slipperiness? (Or is that too glib? More likely one of the attractions of London is that most people never experience it as something as huge as ‘London’)
Anyway, I would never want to write about London music as such. Because I don’t feel like a Londoner. I’m interested in something that’s been even less written about – music about London; or the stories and dreams and images of London you can uncover through that music.
The methodology is insultingly simple: I typed the word London into a P2P server. A thousand people sharing “Lifeforms” and “Dead Cities”: oops. Crash. I typed it in again with a search proviso: no “future” for me. Then I downloaded anything I saw with the word in a song title. “London”, “Lost Rivers Of London”, “Red London”, “London In The Rain”, “London Leatherboys”…. anything. Any genre, vocal or non-vocal, long or short, by insiders or outsiders, songs with London at their centre and songs with London a whimsical periphery. And now I’m going to sit down, listen to them, and see what I learn.
Tom in Blog 7 • No Comments
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