#Imai mon amour

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Bad Thoughts about Imai Hisashi

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I LOVE THIS LITTLE HUMAN MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF

IMAI IN THE FALLING DOWN // BUCK-TICK 2023 IZORA TOUR ❤️‍🔥🖕🏻

[ross-nekochan]

Laura Imai Messina è stata la mia mentore per lo studio del giapponese. Ero al liceo, seguivo solo qualche anime e lei creò una pagina su Facebook: Giappone mon amour. Raccontava fatti particolari che non avevo mai sentito né letto e mescolava racconti di sé e della sua vita a Tokyo nel suo blog. A quei tempi, su Facebook eravamo una piccola comunità e parlavamo spesso nei commenti a tu per tu. L'ammiravo moltissimo. Il suo primo romanzo edito è stato Tokyo Orizzontale.

Sulla stregua della grande onda di misticismo esotico crescente che si porta dietro il Giappone dagli anni '80 in poi, Laura ha prontamente deciso di calvacare l'onda. Un'onda che in parte ha creato lei stessa. Scrive libri che adottano un misticismo molto ricercato, sopraffino, che permette al lettore di sentirsi "vero conoscitore di un Giappone intimo, speciale, autentico", poi però le copertine rinforzano stereotipi, essenzialismi culturali e feticizzazioni della donna asiatica. (Lo so che è in gran parte colpa della casa editrice, but still vuol dire che non si batte a sufficienza contro questa cosa.)

Ad oggi, 10 anni e passa dopo, posso dire che quasi la disprezzo. Dopo aver conosciuto veramente quel pezzo di mondo, non riesco a capire come si fa a non fare altro che infiocchettarlo continuamente e venderlo così. Perché questa è truffa. E se fatta da intellettuali, la truffa è doppia.

Roberto Saviano ha per me il merito di aver denunciato con lettere di fuoco tutto l'odio per il putridume che c'��, trasmettendo comunque amore per una terra. Lui sì che merita la mia ammirazione. Che senso ha dire solo bella Napoli, pizza, sole e mandolino? O ricordare quanto sia bello il golfo, il Vesuvio, quanto è bella Santa Chiara, le stradine strette e tortuose, quanto sono fighi i murales di Jorit, quanto so di cuore i napoletani, quando ci sono periodi in cui si spara? Quando tutto quello che vedi intorno a te è causa e conseguenza di tutto quello che la intossica quella terra?

In Tokyo Orizzontale forse forse una sorta di denuncia la posso pure intravedere: Tokyo è un melograno, ma che può anche ubriacarti, intossicarti, farti perdere la testa e toglierti tutto a tal punto che dalla posizione eretta ti costringe a quella orizzontale - sdraiato a terra ubriaco fradicio alla stazione di Shibuya.

Così si deve fare. Perché non bisogna scomodare Freud per dire che se non odi, non ami veramente. Se non hai le palle di dire:"Sì sta terra fa schifo al cesso, non ti prendo per il culo anzi ti racconto la sua merda... ma in fondo io l'amo lo stesso", per me non sei nessuno.

Sei solo l'ennesimo pifferaio magico - truffatore e schiavo delle dinamiche di potere economiche e sociali. E allora vai, acchiappa i cretini che ti seguono ascoltando il tuo piffero di merda. Peccato che saranno solo esattamente come quegli stessi cretini che si lasciano abbindolare dal profumo di una bella femmina e poi manco la toccano perché se scoprono il marcio che c'ha dentro, si cagherebbero addosso.

Bibliografia:

Laura Imai Messina, Tokyo Orizzontale, Edizioni Piemme, 2014

Roberto Saviano, Gomorra, Mondadori, 2006

Sandra Lyne, "Consuming Madame Chrysanthème: Loti's 'dolls' to Shanghai Baby, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context” 2002

(http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue8/lyne.html)

(Qua ci starebbe qualcosa di Freud per portare acqua al mio mulino da vera troia, ma figurati se ho sbatti di cercare sta cosa per un post di merda su Tumblr)

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Imai Hisashi is tired of your bullshit

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OMG I found the diary of Imai's 1994 trip to London?

He spent over SEVEN. HUNDRED. POUNDS. on CDs, mostly in Virgin and Rough Trade.

Also, apparently he is an amazing cook? And he does the washing up!

And for a genius guitarist, he is apparently incredibly humble - and rode the bus from the flat in Maida Vale to the studio in Kilburn.

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Been listening to No. 0 on repeat today (because I recently read *that* famous interview, which was actually promoting it) - hence why I've been digging out the lyrics to Nostalgia - Mechanical Life and Empire of Light.

That combined with today's Imai-bot about one of my favourite albums:

(「Six/Nine」について） SとNを使いたかったんですよ。S極とN極という正反対さを。最初は単なる「S/N」にしようと思ったんだけど、意味が分からなすぎるから、もうちょっと何かないかなあと思ってたら、こういうぴったりハマる言葉があったんで (笑)。6と9も形的に正反対じゃないですか。

(About "Six/Nine") I wanted to use S and N. The polar opposites of S and N poles. At first I thought of just using it as "S/N", but it didn't make much sense, so I was wondering if there was something else I could use, and then I found this word that fit perfectly (lol). Aren't 6 and 9 also opposite in shape?

I was trying to say something in an email today (and probably completely failing) about Japan's cultural Post-War Traumatic Stress Disorder (something I found quite similar to the German Stunde Null) - and me trying to express that I thought Japan's great traumatic break actually started earlier: how during the Meiji Restoration the country effectively went from Feudalism to full-tilt Industrialist Steampunk Capitalism pretty much overnight...

And something suddenly clicked about what it is that Imai always seems to be striving for in his lyrics, the way he mixes his obsessions with maths and physics with allusions to Japanese mythology to form his cyberpunk cyborg metaphors and steampunk imagery. (Someone once asked me what Buck-Tick's songs were about, and I replied, "Oh, all my favourite things - sex, angels and astronomy!") And wondering if this is, in a way, Imai trying at a cultural level, to reconcile the polar opposites of post-Meiji Japan of technology and science with its pre-Meiji cosmology of Buddhism and Shinto?

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This somehow came up during the Buck-Tick listening party today - how Imai doesn't just politely cover his mouth with his hand when he laughs - he uses the back of his wrist or his entire elbow to cover his mouth when he laughs!

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When you're flying so high your shadow arrives before you do

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From this interview:

―― And for Kemonotachi no Yoru, it might’ve turned out the way it did as a result, but it seems like it was meant to be (the Makuhari Live’s) theme song.

I: Uhhuh. I really like it.

―― What do you think of Sakurai-san’s lyrics?

I: I think it’s already a perfect fit. In the beginning, the working title for the demo was “Autobahn”. Then even after Sakurai-san gave it those lyrics and finished recording the song, it was still “Autobahn”. So I was getting worried about that. And then Sakurai-san said to me, “Hey, this isn’t going to be called ‘Autobahn’, is it?    I think the lyrics are completely different (from that title) though,” and some days after that, I changed the title.

Excuse me, but What?

獣たちの夜 (Night of the Beasts) was originally called AUTOBAHN?

(I mean, this does confirm my suspicions from my Ash-ra post about Imai and his Krautrock thing, and the titles just being completely misunderstood or disregarded by Sakurai)

I would never have guessed it from listening to the final version(s) of the song, but now he's mentioned it, I can kinda hear it? Mostly in that the song is basically just one giant riff that keeps building and building (very Krautrock, tho this particular riff is more Amon Düül II's Archangel Thunderbird than Kraftwerk). And also, of course the theremin-solo in the middle. But most of all, the kind of slippery gear-changey sounds woven around the transitions between guitar chords that sound like a portomento on a monophonic synth like Kraftwerk used to record the passing-car noises on the original Autobahn. (Those are the kind of tiny, perverted sonic details that make me love this band!)

Earlier in the interview, Imai said that the song changed a lot between demo and finished results - damn, would I love to hear that more Autobahn-y demo, tho.

―― And you’ll be releasing a single. RONDO has a tie-up where it’ll be used as the ending theme song of Gegege no Kitaro, but what was your concept for Kemonotachi no Yoru?

I: This was in my stock. It’s completely different now, but the demo which was made from that riff was there. From start to end. But I completely forgot that it existed. I opened a folder in my PC and saw it, then when I wondered what it was and opened it up, this was in there (lol).

―― Right. Listening closely, this song is made of the one same riff going on from start to end. I thought that it’s got quite a crazy composition and it really turned into a good song (lol).

I: I thought, “Oh, right I made that. Ah, this is cool.” And making use of that guitar riff and the vibe of that demo, I redid it from the start and turned it into Kemonotachi no Yoru.

[kunstmull]

Driving myself crazy over this interview with Imai Hisashi.

The question is quite ambiguous, "Have you ever liked someone of the same sex" - I've seen three translations of the word used for "like" here: a) be in love with b) liking (as in friendship) c) liking (as in fancying)

Atsushi's answer is absolutely unambiguous; he starts gushing about how much he loves Issay and how cool he thinks Issay is

Hide, Yuta and Toll's answers are equally unambiguous. All of them specify, "romantic love?" and answer "No!"

Imai, in very neurodivergent fashion, responds to an ambiguous question with an equally ambiguous answer. "I have! As a human being."

And I don't know how to translate that.

Because in English, "I like you... as a person" has strong connotations of "...but I'm not physically attracted to you and don't want to date / have sex with you."

But "I like you... as a human being" has strong connotations of "I am so strongly attracted to your whole personality that the details of your physical sex are simply irrelevant."

And in Japanese, I don't know if either of those connotations exist.

However, the latter interpretation is so common among neurodivergent folks that there's a whole term for it: Neuroqueer (in a nutshell, the idea that the whole concepts of binary gender and fixed orientation are so heavily dependent on the exact types of social conventions that ND folks struggle with, as to render them meaningless to us.)

I love that Imai leaves it so ambiguous. There's one interpretation that leaves this at "I love men, but only platonically" and there's another that is "I love... humans!" And given my headcanon of Imai as Neurodivergent, I know which interpretation I'm going with.

[kunstmull]

Captain Save-A-Hisashi rides again!

I don't know if the comment got eaten by the spam filter; or if it was another case of "did not understand my sense of humour"; or if the blogger has fallen into a black hole on the way to Andromeda, but I did actually save the text, and wanted to post it somewhere, in case anyone ever has any response.

{Comment followed a thread where a random googler had asked for explanation of the Greek letters in Buck-Tick's Nostalgia - Vita Mechanicalis. CP responded to the effect of, don't read too much into it, Imai is not very well educated and the whole thing was just a reference to some Steampunk phone game.}

((Further edited to add: yes, it's entirely possible that this is just a reference to a game, and Delta-Iota-Lambda-Xi refers to nothing more complicated than:

There is indeed both a Delta and a Xi in these characters))

The comment I left in response:

It’s true that Imai is an art school dropout, and his monotropic brain simply cannot hang on to information he doesn’t have an interest in, such as penmanship or random prefectures of Japan. It’s such a SHAME that there is literally no place on Earth or Andromeda where one can come across Greek symbols other than high school maths class!

Chapter 1: amidst the profusion of Imai interviews I’ve absorbed recently, I came across one where our boy mentioned reading James Gleick, so it’s clear he actually does read popular science. (Sorry I can’t footnote it for you, my monotropic brain has never got the hang of footnotes.) Something clicked, as to why the ill-fated tour for Cosmos was named CHAOS: it’s a pun, a synthesis of the “Anarchy” meaning (another long-term preoccupation of Imai, hence the most obvious) and the “complex, self-organising systems” meaning – manifesting in the post-Gleick mid-90s as a pop-science fascination with Fractals. On the chance Imai was fibbing about reading a big book about maths, the ideas popularised by Gleick were widely discussed and heavily used in the fields of Videogame design and Animation – fields Imai has well-known and documented Special Interests in. Knowledge absorbed from pop culture is still knowledge.

Chapter 2: Imai got online in the mid-90s, as documented in his seminal “log off and touch grass” song. What was he arguing about on Usenet? Same things as the rest of us early internet geeks: “Dinosaurs, CT scanners, love, that girl's tooth prints, Klein bottles etc.” Your translation of “いわゆる全てに共通する図形“ is lost, but Google misTranslate is giving me "So-called common-to-all shapes" something that looks suspiciously like set theory or platonic solids? The ~Science Side of Tumblr~. Imai was soaking in it!

Conclusion: living on the net, reading popular science books, imbibing sci-fi, it is not inconceivable that Imai either *does* know the common maths/physics meanings of the Greek symbols he chose; or he lifted them directly from someone who does. (Edited to add: this is the thing; even if he did just lift it from a game; games designers are notorious for adding esoteric references as Easter Eggs. Coming from a game does not mean that it is not meaningful.)

So let’s look at these symbols and see how they link to other common geography of Hisashiland

Δ Delta – this is the easiest one. Delta is the rate of change, usually over time. Everything changes. The only constant over time is change. (The second law of thermodynamics, entropy fans.) ((Edited to add: if I look through my Tumblr archives, I probably can find a long post I made about the relationship between the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Einstuerzende Neubauten's Sehnsucht.))

Ι Iota – the smallest possible amount. How often has Imai referenced scientific words for the concept of the most tiny? Atom Futurist No. 9 (Democritus theorised the Atom – indivisible – as the smallest, infinite, indestructible building block of nature before the Victorians smashed this to pieces with the discovery of the Electron.) Quantum I & II – quantum theory smashed the idea of the smallest building block of nature the way Rutherford smashed the indivisible atom. Iota is another science term for the same thing: the tiny indivisible.

Λ Lambda – the Cosmological Constant. Since the Big Bang, the Universe has been constantly expanding (see section Delta – change!) Lambda is a little mathematical fiddle that Einstein added to the Theory of Relativity to account for the fact that the expansion of the universe is always accelerating. Why? Dark Matter? Dark Energy? This is hotly debated in physics, but in Hisashiland the metaphor of Dark Matter or Dark Energy is repeatedly employed as a necessary corrective for the Blue Sky of conformity.

Ξ Xi – this one was the hardest to crack. At first I thought he’d mis-transliterated the Greek Chi which is the standard mathematical X of the unknown. Xi is the Riemann Function. What’s he about? He’s usually associated with non-Euclidean geometries, surfaces that are impossible outside of multidimensional spaces – moebius strips, Calabi-Yau manifolds (the working model for superstrings, another way of trying to understand where all the extra dark energy/matter is hiding in 10-dimensional space, see Lambda for what Dark Energy means in Hisashiland), and… Klein Bottles, which Imai was getting in flame wars over on the early internet. To understand the true scientific nature of reality, one has to think outside the mosquito net – outside the constraints of the human limitations of three-dimensional perception. In Riemannian maths, dark energy can fold up to hide inside extra dimensions within infinitesimally tiny spaces.

Now these letters may have been chosen stochastically, but all four of them refer to concepts that recur again and again in the hermeneutics of Hisashiland. And one of Gleick’s most profound insights is that randomness isn’t actually that random. Even chaos follows its own cosmological order. Imai may be dirty and strange, but he’s nowhere near as cute-and-dumb as he looks!

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Every day I wake up, and I do a little cry because I wasted 50 years of my life not knowing Imai Hisashi was a thing in this world

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IMAI ANGLE

I was very very sad this morning until I discovered IMAI ANGLE on YouTube - you can watch Buck-Tick videos that are 100% IMAI HISASHI guitar theremin twirling action!

God I'm in heaven, lookit that whammy-bar abuse!!!

(Warning, Imai looks like he's in a bit of a mood by the end of it, probably because Atsushi keeps stepping in his sight line)

I love being to watch him so closely, so you can see what he's actually doing to produce those unearthly sounds - but he also makes me feel a lot better because even he comes off the click sometimes...

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Oh I'm going to do that as a link

Speaking as someone who spent many years in a "mathspop" band, there is nothing I love more than a songwriter who sneaks equations into their work

Δデルタ    Ιイオタ    Λラムダ    Ξクシー Deruta    Iota    Ramuda    Kushii Δ Delta    Ι Iota    Λ Lambda    Ξ Xi

Δ Delta - the change within any given system (usually over time)

ι Iota - the smallest possible amount, also used as a fancy way to denote Imaginary Numbers (that is, the square root of negative one)

Λ Lambda - the Cosmological Constant, a little mathematical fiddle you have to add to any equations in astrophysics, to account for the fact that the universe is unceasingly expanding

Ξ Xi - ooh, wow, I'm going to have to look this one up, as I don't think (as I initially suspected) just a fancy way of writing the usual mathematical X (which is a different letter in Greek)