It's a question you may have been asked so many times you have lost count. I bet many art critics get asked it so many times that they have developed a default answer to which ever subject it is.
For example, movies can be placed on this hierarchical pyramid I just made up.
Here's its breakdown.
Kane's Podium. Named after the protagonist of "The Greatest Movie of All Time." These are the movies you'll find in any critic's Top Ten Favourites.
Near Masterpieces. Those movies that are beyond "good" that can be considered "masterpieces" or "classics." Most high brow and art house movies can be found here.
The Good Movie bundle. Movies that are not good enough to be near masterpieces, but good enough to be worth seeing in a multiplex. If it appeared on TV, you might consider watching it.
Multiplex Filler. Movies you only remember as posters on the walls of multiplexes while going to see a "good movie" or only saw because the "good movie" you wanted to see was sold out or not on a convenient time. Also commonly seen on TV A LOT.
The Direct-to-Video Bargain Basement Bin. It doesn't need explaining.
Now, I know some will question where some of the movies I have chosen to feature are placed on this graphic. But it was made in a bit of a hurry, so shot me. But your disgust proves my point I am making. Also, consider this question.....
Where would you put Star Wars on this pyramid?
Many would place A New Hope in the good movie bundle, due to snobbery against everything sci-fi. Some would place it on Kane's Podium (and defend it with their lives). Only ill-educated morons (and I use these terms very broadly) would place it below the "good movie bundle."
And that's just factors present-day opinions. An opinion of something can change over time, due to many factors that one can't just out, because the relationship between a fan and a work of art can be as complicated as one between two human beings.
You see the problem?
Art (like politics) is a very subjective subject. Every person has their own definition to what is considered "art" or what is a "masterpiece." Its something many people know and don't know at the same time. They know "everyone is entitled to their own opinion" but they will get angry anyway when they hear someone say "I like Digimon/Hollyoaks/James Blunt." You can't win against everyone, no matter what you like. Even if the thing in question is brad new or something that has been part of the wallpaper for centuries.
That's why, if you ask me "what is my favourite [insert thing here]?" my answer may be different every time. It could be because of who is asking or how I feel at the time.
Honestly, I find finding favourites very hard. I find it easier if I'm asked for a "top 3/5/10" of a thing. As long as I can have them in order of what I think of first. No hierarchy. No number 1 top of the pile choice. Just a small chosen selection.
I don't do new year resolutions. A year is a very long time to commit to something trivial, like many common new year resolutions. But if I did make one last year (and the year before, to be honest) it'll be this..... Get a job.
Since graduation in 2012 I was in, what you may call, the "finding your voice" stage of my creative career. Or, as Daily Mail readers would call "scrounging off the state time." A lot of people have some idea what they want to do when they leave school or higher education. But I didn't. I had no idea what I actually wanted to do for a living.
Also, been autistic, most of my time at education was focused on academic stuff and getting good grades. I rarely socialised with school friends. I didn't get a part-time job while studying. I didn't even attend my school prom. I was just wasn't interested. It's only recently I realised this and its consequences.
During that time I had some assistance from the National Autistic Society. It started with been given a mentor that forced me out of the house once a week to meet up. Soon, someone in the office heard about my talents and I was asked to edit a newsletter for them, beginning my professional career. By 2014 I began to instigate small talk without prompt. Something I never did before.
Things were improving. Then my dad died, and a few other relatives very quickly, triggering a bout of depression that needed pharmaceutical intervention. And in 2017 the allowances I was provided by the government were cut. For months I had no income what so ever. So, I was made to sign up to the infamous Universal Credit system that has become famous for reasons that'll mark it as successful as the Corn Laws.
So, I needed money, and Universal Credit was paying me pathetically.
After my stand-up debut in 2016 the thought of finding employment lingered in my mind. I thought that by 2018 I'll get a job. That didn't happen. Because of my lack of social skilling during my school years, I needed help. So I got help.
Last week, thanks to the assistance of Remploy, I got my first ever paid job - delivering pizzas.
On my search to find jobs, I pondered about applying for jobs I found advertised in take-aways looking for delivery drivers. I had been fetching and taking things to and from family members since I got my licence, so I thought such a job will be no different, except that I'll be doing it a dozen times in a couple of hours a night and I GET PAID TO DO IT.
I am still on the look out for creative jobs, and applied to a few. The pizza thing is just something to rake in money until then. And I'm glad I got it, as my finances were not so good when I started.
So that's what's been happening in the past while. And since its Christmas, here's my card to you all....
I admit that I struggled to think of a design for this year's card,
but this late development gave me some inspiration.
One of the biggest "facts" in the world is that science and art separate things.
This is complete bull$%£".
The separation of art and science, academically, is a recent invention. Until the 19th century the border that separated scientists and artists were a blur. Think Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, and the guyswhoinventedphotography, if you want examples.
The reason I bought this up is because of an idea I just had today....
A science book aimed at artists.
I have the skills and knowledge to do it, but should I pursue it?
The term "artist" is pretty loose in definition here. It can include cartoonists and animators, as well as writers, illustrators, cross-stitchers, and musicians. And I'm sure many of them have wondered about science once in a while.
It'll be like David Macaulay's The Way Things Work,
if you wanted an idea what this book might look like.
But, I'll only do it if you demand it.
If you do, leave a comment.
(especially if you happen to be an artist who struggled to understand science.)
Have you ever had the urge to take a screwdriver to something to take it apart just to look inside it?
I have. Just today I did this.....
I purchased this Acctim alarm clock last year, during my crazy eBay binge. Its fully-mechanical! Yes, you can buy a mechanical spring-powered clock made this century. That's why I bought it. Cost me less than £10.
Now, I do already have some form of alarm clock at home when I bought this. So why did I do it?
The answer is above.
Yes, I bought something just to take it apart.
In fact, I bought a few things just to take them apart. It's only now I got the time to do this teardown. And more are planned in the future, so watch out.
Written in 2016. First published in News and Views newsletter.
You are in an art gallery confronted by a painting. About A3-sized, the
oil painting depicts a Parisian bar full of a dozen customers doing what they
usually do in a bar in a style similar to Claude Monet and the like. Behind the
bar is a honey-blonde woman serving the drinks with a perifereia of bottles
behind her.
“This is one of the noted works of the lesser-known French artist Monet
La Trencher – A Bar Scene from 1891. Part of the Neo-Impressionist movement, Trencher
explored urban Paris…..”
“Rubbish!”
“Excuse me?”
“This is a fake.”
“And how would you know?”
“Because I am Monet La Trencher. Trencher never existed. I invented
him.”
“Why?”
“Shut up, whoever you are. The gallery closes in ten minutes and I got
a …"
“Good. Plenty of time for me to spot my deliberate flaws in this
painting.”
“Deliberate flaws?”
“Of course. I put a few in to …”
“Just tell us, man.”
“Fine. Notice the youth drinking a coke.”
“Yes, the man holding the coke bottle.”
“That bottle shouldn’t exist in 1891.”
“But I thought coke was invented in the 1880s.”
“Yes, but that bottle wasn’t introduced until 1915.”
(Gasp all round.)
“And there’s more. Notice the bottle of Iron-Brew behind the bar maid.
Didn’t exist until 1901. That sign in the background, the font I used is
Century Roman, created in 1894.”
“Security!”
Two security guards arrive to drag “Trencher” away.
“The bar serves Strong Bow and Famous Grouse whiskey!”
“Sorry about that. Where were we?”
“He’s right, you know. According to my phone that coke bottle design
was first introduced in 1915.”
“And that lass is wearing a fitness tracker.”
“that’s it. Tour’s over. Gallery is about to close everyone. Gift shop
is on your right.”
Everyone leaves the gallery. The lights go out…
and (thanks to some
luminous dye) the words
“actually painted in 2013 – Monet La Trencher” appear
on the painting.
Written in September 2017. First published in News and Views newsletter.
Imagine sometime in the future where space travel is as
regular as air travel is today. Because of the distances involve they are space
ferries in operation between the planets. As everyone knows, it takes forever
to travel to Mars, so these ferries have facilities to make them as
self-sufficient as possible and the trip comfortable. Things like automated
farms, restaurants, a school, theatres, a library, a hospital and … a vet.
Yes, some passengers have bought their pets with them. On
one of these vessels at any given time they are probably a dozen animals at
these vet/kennel at any given time. A dozen animals, of all walks of life,
including fish.
Now imagine that something happened to one of these vessels.
Space can be dangerous, after all. What if an asteroid hit one of those vessels
and killed everyone on-board …. Except the animals? (One got smuggled on board
and was under quarantine, leading to the place been sealed off, saving their
lives.)
So, here’s the question. With an endless supply of food,
water and air, and no humans to guide them, how would they cope?
In an environment originally-built for humans, would these
animals continue been “animals?” Could curiosity eventually allow them to work
out how their life support systems work, and allow them to fix them if a fault
occurs? Could that later go further, maybe allowing them to read our books? And
if so, would they understand what they read? Would they learn from them? Would
they use the knowledge we had recorded to build a new civilization? A society
with laws and a culture like ours or something completely different? Something
unique. Maybe they’ll create their own stories and literature. Maybe in some
distant future, a descendent of a bird might be reading Penguin Island
with hands that were once wings. Just a thought.
Have you
ever tried to explain what something is to someone who has never seen or heard
of that thing before? Say something you experienced while on a trip to
somewhere “foreign.” Or something you use everyday to someone from another
culture. Or an abstract concept to a student or disciple. Or maybe what a new
craze or fashion is in your culture?
Have you
ever, during such explanations, used other things to compare it with? Have you
ever, while explaining one thing, ended up explaining what another thing is
because they didn’t
know what the thing you comparing it with is? Have you ever had trouble
explaining things because you used words or terms that the listener has never
heard before?
Now, keep
all this in your mind and get out a dictionary. Flick through it and read a
random definition in it… and another…. and another…..
You may now
have an idea why making a dictionary is no easy task … and one that can take
years to complete.
It took Samuel Johnson seven years to make A Dictionary of the English Languagein the 18th century. This is considered
an amazing feat for an individual, if you consider how long it took some
dictionaries to be made with the help of a team. The Brothers Grimm started
work on Deutsches Wörterbuch (“The German Dictionary”) in 1838.
It wasn’t complete until 1961
(well, a few revolutions, two world wars and the division of Germany during the
Cold War did hold them up a bit (the team who worked on it after the Grimms
died)). Of course, Johnson and the Grimms were doing dictionaries for whole entire languages, making their efforts more tasking. But I bet even dictionaries that have limited what they could list (dictionaries on certain fields, like medicine, for instance) are as tricky to write as those epic productions of lexicography. Back in January I did a post proposing an interesting idea - a dictionary. "The Cultural Vandal's Dictionary of Visual Culture" it was originally called. Based in an old book I discovered it was a dictionary that contained images of how various things have been used in media. In other words, a dictionary of memes and how they are used in culture.
Back then, it was just an idea.
Now, its a project that's going to (probably) take decades to do (on and off, while doing everything else). I've already bought an external hard drive dedicated to collecting images (and other things) illustrating entries and (just recently) I (sort of) finished writing a list of entries and their basic definitions.... which is the main subject of this post. I want this book (it would be great idea to make it into a real book, like a real dictionary you'll find in a library) to be like an actual dictionary. A two or three column page layout throughout. But how I do the entries is a bit different. Each entry will begin with a small simplified picture of the subject (a picture so simple that (I hope) if embossed a blind person could make out what it is). Then you'll get its name (in English, the most learned second language on Earth) and a simple definition, before finally getting the text explaining it and examples of it. Here's a random example of definitions I've written (as they are now. They may change in the future).....
Abacus A counting aid made from a ladder
with beads threaded through its steps.
Circle A flat shape which results when you
curve a straight line until the ends connect.
Flasher A person (usually a male) who
exposes their uncovered body parts (especially those subject to taboo) in
public.
Piano A machine designed to play music by
a mechanism where pressed keys make hammers hit strings inside it.
Salamander A wet-skinned lizard-like animal.
Spoon A tool made of a stick with a bowl
attached at one end used to stir, dig into, or pick up food while eating or
preparing food.
Trojan Horse A means to move a means of attack
into a target without the target knowing it is an attack.
Wedding A ceremony where two people
officially become a couple under a culture’s rules governing people pairings.
To write these I developed some rules.
They have to be short (As much as possible, just one sentence).
I have to use a simple limited vocabulary. (try to use only words that are also found in the dictionary)
The "simple limited vocabulary" rule was inspired Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer. In it, all the text is written only using the "ten hundred" most-commonly used words in the English language. (the word "thousand" wasn't one of the "ten hundred.") Admittedly, I did use a dictionary to aid me (and I haven't run them through Munroe's Simple Writer to check if they are as simple as they can be …. let). But, its a good starting point for this project. According to Microsoft Word's paragraph count feature, I have listed exactly 1,350 entries for my dictionary. So, this dictionary is going to be pretty big. (The book that inspired this project only had 1,200 entries) The original dictionary that inspired this project was limited to memes used in visual media (it was a book made for graphic designers). My dictionary is going to expand to all forms of culture - music, poetry, cuisine, fashion, interior design, architecture, cave art, even language itself (One recent purchase was Written in Stone by Christopher Stevens, a book about the original Indo-European language and how its words led to the creation of the many words we use today). One last thing, this is the final title for it - "The Cultural Vandal’s Dictionary of
Memes, Metaphors, Tropes, Clichés, and the Occasional Stereotype."
Welcome to another act of cultural vandalism. Today is a sort of small act of vandalism as the subject in question is small. It's the song - "One Piece at a Time" by Johnny Cash. A song about an assembly line worker who decides to get a free car by stealing parts from the factory one piece at a time over a period of a couple of years. It seems a clever idea. The factory could (back then) afford to lose a piece or two a day. It's probability. But this scheme had one huge flaw - where he was working - Cadillac. Why is that a problem? Cadillac is a part of General Motors, a company notorious for the practice of planned obsolescence - the practice of making products that only last a set amount of time in the hope of making customers buy the next new model. Its something many people have raged against since it first came to public attention in the 1930s and attacked in a number of adverts from European carmakers, such as Volvo.
"Beat the System" Volvo ad (1971)
If the man had been working in a factory making, say, Volkswagen Beetles it wouldn't have been a problem. He would have a car that was no different to the ones leaving the factory, as these classic car ads from the iconic DDBVolkswagen campaign clearly demostrate.
Volkswagen ads from DDB (1960s)
But he worked for Cadillac. He desired a Cadillac, like most Americans then. It was this engineered desire (in the form of high quality engineering and shiny chrome) that made Cadillac the aspirational brand. It was the car you saved up for. Its the car you bought to show off that you made it in the world. Its the car rich texans attach bull horns to. You get what I'm saying, don't you? Cadillac was the car everyone wanted if they had the cash. If you made or saved enough, you bought the Cadillac (which may be the reason why Cadillacs are mostly driven by old these days - they saved enough to afford one).
One thing that fuelled that desirability was Cadillac's habit of redesigning their cars every year or so. This made the newest Cadillac look fresh and exciting while the older models (which can be bought more cheaply in the second-hand car market) looked dated and something from yesteryear. It was this that was the biggest flaw in the factory worker's plan. Without realizing, he wasn't collecting the parts to make one single model, he was collecting parts for multiple models of car. Considering the changing shape of the Cadillacs from 1949-73 its astonishing that the factory worker didn't notice the problem until the very end. I mean, I would have noticed that I got a left front wing that has two headlights and a right wing with just one let alone that only one rear wing has a tailfin. But he had the parts and built a car with them anyway. The result was a mutant Cadillac.
So what did this mutant Cadillac look like? Although a fictional object, an actual car was commissioned for promotional purposes. It featured in a music video for "One Piece at a Time".
In case the video is no longer available, here's a photo of it.
Incredible, isn't it? Although the parts weren't made to fit, with some bodging and tinkering, you can make a car out of any collection of mismatched parts. The very car from the video is currently a museum piece in the Historic Auto Attractions museum in Roscoe, Illinois.
Yeah, when I first wrote this back in 2013, I was thinking of featuring Cat in a "final sketch" at the end of each post. I had sketched out the car back then. It's only today that I finally drew it!
According to one of those anecdotes that a person tells so many times that the person later forgets the actual event and only recalls himself telling the story, one night in 1971 a young man was hitch-hiking across Europe, like a number of young people did at this time, before hitch-hiking lost its "cool." On that night, this young man was drunk, lying down on a field near Innsbruck, Austria. He was looking up to the stars. Next to him was his copy of Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe. He then had a thought - "Would it be a good idea for someone to write a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?"
Also, I have been looking inward to myself and my work. Been almost 30 does make you do that. For years (maybe since I started writing fiction back in 2003) you could say I was in my "finding my voice" phase of my artistic career. A phase pretty much every creative goes through. You start off copying other people's work, dissecting it to find out why it works, and using that knowledge to improve your own. Finding originality is overrated - mostly by lawyers who specialize in intellectual property. If you marry this with a lot of practise you (eventually) get a true creative. But a potential creative in this phase can be vulnerable, so don't insult their work so called "friends." Leave the most serious criticism to people who really know their stuff ... and Simon Cowell.
Recently I began writing a big story. It was of an idea I had for years. (I wont's say what it is let) While I was doing so I realized something - I'm becoming Douglas Adams. Of all the sources of inspiration I have ever found (and I have found a LOT of inspiration all over the place) the works of Douglas Adams can be seen as the most significant. And thinking back its no surprise.
I first read his stuff back in high school. I was looking for a book to do a report on for English class and I found in the school library The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I found it interesting. The ridiculous situations with (some) logic, how technology is used in the story and how he describes things were things that stood out to me when I first read it.
I had heard about The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy some time earlier (in 2003 it was voted fourth most favourite novel in the UK in a televised survey). But it wasn't until the movie came out in 2005 that I finally got familiar with the story. Not long afterwards I read the books. It was by this time that the idea of the big story I just started writing was beginning to form....
I don't what to reveal what it is about right now. All I can say that its basically a fictional account of a world-changing event that happened in a cartoon I was watching back in 2005, caused by an object in a way that'll make the idea of tea been the source of creation of a new form of spacecraft propulsion look like a lead balloon.
As I began writing this story I noticed the Doug Adams hallmarks in my approach to storytelling - the ridiculous situations with (some) logic, how technology is used in the story and the long-winged way he describes things. They are there as clear as day. I can't deny it now. I'm becoming Douglas Adams.
Outside writing fiction, Douglas Adams does share some similarities to me, particularly on the subject technology. He was a avid fan of computers, especially the Macintosh. In fact, he is claimed to be the first person in Europe to own a Mac. He was an Apple fan boy long before it became cool and then annoying.
It's a shame he died before he could see the iPhone. That device would have pan-galactic-gargle-blasted his mind.
The aim of this project is to make a book that explains how computers work in a way everyone can understand. I plan to do this by...
Using as little jargon as possible
Using tangible mechanical metaphors and diagrams to explain the complex
And breaking down the computer into its basic parts
One thing I imagine the many future readers of this book will think about is how does everything I explain relate to the actual thing. In other words, what's actually going on inside all those microchips? No metaphors. Show me what's actually going on. It's like people wanting to see the explosions inside an internal combustion engine.
This is the biggest challenge of this project. Computers work using electricity, and electricity is invisible (apart from when you apply too much current or voltage to a device). So a small crash course on the subject will be included in the book. But they still demand seeing actual components at work, so my diagrams will have to look like the actual insides of a computer as possible.
However, they will be some who have never taken a screwdriver to a computer before. Those who have always obeyed the "warranty void" stickers. I know some books have shown the insides of computers before, but have they seen them? Did they do a good job explaining their parts for those who have?
I thought it would be a good idea to actually take apart a computer for those readers..... and I did.
What you'll see above is an old Windows PC my late dad owned in the mid-1990s. Judging from labels on the components it was made in 1995 and was then upgraded in 1997 (it had two hard drives. One 450MB one (which it originally had) and a 3.49GB one that was added later on). I have memories playing games, exploring CD-ROMs and using CorelDRAW 4 and Kid CAD on this very machine. It was buried under some junk when I found it a while ago. (The later Windows PC he bought in 2000 to replace it was thrown into a skip in 2016. I know because I was the one who lifted it to that skip.)
I thought a PC from this vintage would be the ideal choice for dismantling for the readers. This may be due to me seeing computers of this vintage dismantled in books from about the same time...
But, after thinking about it, a 1990s desktop is ideal for my book. A PC today may be light years away from a 90s desktop, but inside they look very similar. It's like the transmission in a modern car is not that different of that found in a Ford Model T. This would help with one of the main points of my book - all computers (from the 1930s to now) work exactly the same way. They may use different technologies to do some things, like valves or floppy disks, but the principles behind them are the same.
It was in the 90s when PCs really became mainstream devices, after killing its many rival incompatible systems, leading to today's industry of build-it-yourself PCs. Similar to what happened when the Model T became popular in the 1910s. Ford made a car that was simple, to make it easy to mass-produce, use and maintain. Other cars at the time were too complicated than they should have been, which made most drivers employed chuffers - kind of like the specialists that were once the only people who could use computers.
The dismantling of the ancient PC was an adventure of curiosity. It was something that showed how willing I am to do research on a subject, if a project requires it. Here's more photos of my research.
Those last two pics were of the PC's CD-ROM drive. Dismantling that drive was a challenge on its own.
The plan is to turn my observations into a large drawing of a computer's inners, like the one at the top of this post. I've already drawn and mocked up prototypes of the pages featuring this drawing.
The latter one is close to what the final version is going to be like. Note that I include the wires in it and took the components out of the metal casing (the grey rectangle at the bottom).
Since I first told you about this project back in 2016 I have read and watched a lot of research material, made a lot of sketches, and wrote up some text for it.
The dismantling of the old PC this week is the beginning of phase one.
By the time of writing this, I have just watched the 1990s classic anime series The Slayers. For those unfamiliar of this classic of cel animation (its well-animated by Madhouse), its basically Fairy Tail made over a decade early.
Here's something I noticed. When you watch the first episode with you eyes closed you will encounter a scene where you will say to yourself "Is that Brock chatting up a pretty girl after rescuing her from danger .... again?"
And you should, because the scene in question is when the main protagonist Lina Inverse "one of the most powerful and feared sorceresses in all the land" is about to battle against a bunch of bandits when "expert" swordsman Gourry Gabriev the picture and slays the whole lot of them. He did so because he thought Lina (due to her short size) was a child. Cue Edward Elric-style reaction.
The reason for the mental picture of Brock in this scene? Simple. It's because, in the series English dub by Central Park Media, the voice actor who portrayed Gourry was Eric Stuart. And, if you look at his Filmography you will find that, apart from voicing Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh! and been the narrator in One Piece, he is also most noted for playing (until 2006, I'll explain in a future post) Brock in Pokémon (as well as James from Team Rocket, but that's not important).
As I watched this series my ear pieced up another familiar voice. A quick Wikipedia search later showed my ear was correct - the later regular character Amelia Wil Tesla Seyruun was voiced by one Veronica Taylor. And what is interesting is that, apart from voicing Nico Robin in One Piece and April O'Neil in post-2000 adaptions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, she is most noted for been the original English voice of one Ash Ketchum.
Now, noting two poke-actors voicing characters in The Slayers is not enough to be subject to an act of cultural vandalism. What finally made me write this post is what happened in episode 17. In it the gang (Lina, Gourry, and Amelia) have to catch a ship without been ambushed by bounty hunters (someone placed a bounty on them for reasons that will spoil the series finale). To do so they have to disguise themselves. They disguises they choose - three female siblings. Yes, Gourry (the idiotic muscle-bound swordsman) was forced to dress as a girl. I have to admit, his long blonde hair helped in this endeavour. He really did become a Sailor Moon knock-off. Of course, Gourry didn't like the ordeal.
(I later found out that this cross-dressing is a regular joke in every series. Yeeaaae!)
And here comes the reason for this post. Remember when Ash Ketchum was forced to cross-dress? He was forcedtodoso in four episodes (as of 2017). If you factor in that Ash was voiced by the same person who voiced Amelia and that Brock is voiced by the former voice of Gourry I have come to a conclusion -
Brock is a reincarnation of Gourry.
And having Ash cross-dress is Gourry's revenge for been forced to wear woman's clothing back then.
translated to English and printed by Viz Media, LLC in August 2013)
(As far as I know, this scene has never been animated. If I'm wrong, please tell me in the comments.)
This scene involves a very interesting idea from the supernatural.... the Tsukumogami. A tsukumogami is a type of Japanese Yokai that only comes into being and self-aware when a manmade object becomes 100 years old. Depending on the treatment the object gets during their pre-Yokai life, it can be a nice Yoaki (which can be the case for most dolls that belonged to girls who didn't have the bad luck of having a brother who had pleasure torturing them) or an evil Yokai (which can be the case for most cars made by British Leyland).
That Austin 1100 Countryman would definitely become an evil tsukumogami if Basil continues battering that poor defenceless thing. It's not his fault his ignition system wasn't assembled at Toyota quality standards. (Before you brand me for taking a shot at Toyota for its recall saga a few years ago, I like to point out that (at the time of writing) I drive an Aygo, a car that wasn't affected by the recall at all :-).)
The tsukumogami are a notable staple in Japanese popular culture, especially manga that feature supernatural themes, like Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan(as seen at the start of this entry). In the scene pictured Kiyotsugu (head of the Kiyojūji Paranormal Investigation Squad and student council president of Ukiyoe Middle School of Ukiyoe Town, Tokyo) explains the concept of the tsukumogami while he leads the KPIS in a research trip in Nishikigoi Flea Market. One of their crew is Tsurara Oikawa (a Yuki Onna or "snow woman"). She was there for a different reason. In fact, the KPIS just showed up and spotted her there a page earlier. I won't say why she was there, as it'll take forever and reveal too much of the plot of the manga, but I will say that the the black-haired male Yokai who was teasing Tsurara on page one was Gozumaru. While there Tsurara noticed on sale some old small glass bowls used to serve iced desserts. Liking one dating from the Taishō period (Japan's equivalent to the roaring 1920s) she buys it and soon after purchasing it she makes herself some shaved ice. While enjoying her selfmade cold snack, the glass dish talked and turned into a little female figure - a tsukumogami. With an association of ice between them, the little lass who began her life as a fancy "penny lick" (that was the term those glass serving dishes had in the West and its not a double entendre) called her "master." This made Tsurara think. She decided to buy all the "penny licks" the stall had and awakened the tsukumogami they became. She was down before, but now she has an entire army of mini Yokai behind her.
While writing this description of the scene, I pondered about all the lonely children, teens and adults out there that are lonely and only have a collection of dolls, plush toys, and figurines as company. Their probably reading this (or the manga I referenced) and now wishing that their "friends" could actually come to life. Sadly, they can't. Objects have to be over 100years old to become tsukumogami, so unless your a serious plangonologist or arctophilist who has managed to acquire figures of the right vintage, it ain't going to happen.
I know, the idea of tsukumogami seem to be just an Asian one, but if you think about it the idea that inanimate objects have souls is a universal one.
Looking through it, the machines he has chosen to cover in this book are machines that do have... what you might call ... charisma. Some "essence" that makes them stand out from the others. It can be easily explained for individual machines, but its hard to sum up generally.
For example, take cars.... (Yes, we're steering towards Top Gear territory.)
Compare the AustinJohn Cleese beat up earlier with a Trabant. Two cars that (looking at the front) look about the same to the non-car person.
Note: The picture of the Trabant was taken by me inside Glasgow's Transport Museum years before it moved to the Clyde for its river views. The Austin pic is a random one I found online.
Nearly uncanny isn't it. But which is more attractive? I give you some time to think....
Thought about it? Which one do you like most?
Based on prejudice against plastics and two-stroke engines (despite it having a better mileage) the Austin will win. The Trabant is not a well-loved car (except to people nostalgic about the the Cold War and the time Germany was split into two countries). They were ugly machines that they were forced to have due to lack of choice and, when the Wall came down, most former East-Germans abandoned them for something better.
And speaking of two-stroke engines and Trabants, here's an interesting Channel 4 documentary from 1997 about them presented by Robbie Coltrane. In it, he is forced by the producer to take out the engine in a Trabant to demonstrate its ease of maintenance. He claims to have done it in less than 23 minutes, but how can we be sure?
"The 2 Stroke Engine" Coltrane's Planes and Automobiles (1997)
End entertaining tangent.
The Austin, on the other hand, was quite a popular car at its time - the best-selling in Britain. 2.1million Austin 1100s (and its other incarnations made by BL) were sold from 1962-74. Why? Apart from advanced features, like front disc brakes and hydrolastic suspension, or the spacious interior that was about the same in volume compared to the larger Ford Cortina, the Austin looks.... cute. That isn't a surprise, considering that it was designed by the same man who bought the world the cute little Mini. Although the Trabant has a cute face on the front similar to the Austin, it is hindered by the lack of chrome (humans like shiny things).
Why is this relevant to the idea of objects having souls, you ask? Well think about it. In the world of cars some models have an iconic status and these cars are well looked after by their respected owners clubs. As a result, a huge number of these "iconic" cars have survived and are well cherished. But this number is tiny compared to the many more "unloved" models that are slowly dying out every year due to rust and lack of love.
For every Porsche with a careful owner that is safe in a garage they are thousands of Protons with owners of a no-care attitude left out in the rain.
This point hit me recently when I encountered this slideshow from MSN.com entitled 100 popular cars vanishing from UK roads. The last slide was a shock for me, as I have a thing for machines. According to this webpage, the last surviving SEAT Málaga on British roads "died" in 2017. Looking at How Many Left?, they were once hundreds of Malagas in 2001. One of the many millions or so everyday cars made in the 1980s and were still going by the start of this century.
Although the SEAT Malaga isn't (or should I say "wasn't") a particularly special car, the fact that no example of it exists anymore should be a pain in the heart. Especially for the many people SEAT employed in the 1980s to design it, build its prototype, tool its factory, manufacture it, test it, and then finally sale it. The physical proof of all their work and ingenuity ... no more.
If the SEAT Malaga had been a sports car or a car that defined a time and place in history, its story will have been different. But this story is not unique to cars. It can happen to any human-made object. Clothing, gadgets, furniture, buildings, books, records, they are all subject to the same cultural forces that made the SEAT Malaga disappear, preventing it from becoming a tsukumogami.
The concept of the tsukumogami came about in a time when very few people had the money to buy new things for the sake of it. Most people owned things that were hand down generations and were only replaced when they finally broke beyond repair. Then William Painter invented the disposable crown bottle cap and inspired a Mr King Gillette to create his safety razor, featuring cheap replicable blades made to only last a few shaves. Soon manufacturers realized that they could get away with selling people the same product every few years or so with little innovation by just changing its styling. Then they worked out ways to force us to buy the next model (even though we were not that fashion-conscious) by engineering when it'll finally break ... and they won't be able to fix it because only the manufacturers had the right tools and had the monopoly on spare parts, making repairs more expensive than they should. I know some like this state of affairs on the grounds of providing employment and guaranteeing that we all get the latest innovations as soon as they become possible to make, but I personally hate it. Not because of the very obvious environmental problems it causes, but also because I hate when an object that once took someone(s) hours or even years to make gets thrown away just because no one wants it or because a bit broke off it. I prefer it (if possible) if that object able to find another owner than buried under a pile of soiled nappies in a landfill site. But that's the world we find ourselves it.
"We have this idea that stuff from the past lasted a long
time. But that is because we can only see the stuff that has lasted a long
time. We forget about all the stuff we threw away because it was rubbish. …. Most of us only really know what happened because
of what we can see, therefore Medieval England must have been full of
cathedrals. It must have been amazing." - James May, The Reassembler(2017)
What is the oldest object you own? I bet most of you own nothing made before the 1980s. And fewer own something made before the 1960s. And fewer still before World War II. So very few of us will have the chance (if it was possible) to experience seeing an object become a tsukumogami. What to know my answer? Its this.....
a 1920s portable typewriter I bought on eBay
So, we have established that thanks to fashion, certain business practises, education, nostalgia, accident and a general sense of an object's time of usefulness as technology changes, the chances of an object made since 1900 becoming a tsukumogami is very slim. Technically, right now (2018) any object made before or during World War I should be now a tsukumogami. Apart form museum pieces, they are objects over a century old that are in the caring hands of the friends and family of their original owners. You may occasionally see them in one of those antique restoration TV shows. So we can assume that most of them will become good tsukumogami. The ones that would have become evil tsukumogamis may have been destroyed by time or carelessness a long time ago.
When I first encountered the tsukumogami back when I read Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan a few years ago the idea of an object becoming a living being after a certain amount of time intrigued me. But the problem I had picturing it was the 100 year rule. Because its now 2018 the objects that will become tsukumogami are objects from a time period way different from the present. I mean, how many of us have seen (for real) a Hammond Typewriter or a phonograph cylinder? If tsukumogami were real, I have to wait a very long time for objects I'm very familiar with to become them. We have to wait until 2081 for DeLoreans and the first IBM PCs to become them. I bet the artists in Japan who created the many brush strokes depicting tsukumogami would not have imagined that centuries later tsukumogami would be able to perform up to a million instructions per second and travel from 0-60mph in 8.8seconds in a stainless steel shell. And another thing. If tsukumogami existed, it would make TV shows about antiques look like dramas about human trafficking. And if it did you may think twice before sending your old PC to the recycling centre where it could end up been shipped to the third world to be "recycled."
