video – Page 63 – Wis[s]e Words

We still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day

Published on November 30, 20111 Comment

Anime right? Twenty years ago we all thought it was all adolescent power fantasies with teenage boys flying mecha power suits and heroines in stripperific costumes before we realised that we got them confused with superhero comics. Back then I was lucky in that the local videostore my parents had gotten a subscription to when we’d finally gotten a vcr ten years after everybody else (having had a black and white telly until long into the eighties and only the very very basic cable package) had one or two anime/manga enthusiasts working there and they managed to get all the classics. Akira, Legend of the Overfiend, Fist of the Northstar, Dominion Tank Police, Bubblegum Crisis, Macross, all courtesy of Manga UK and all of a certain consistency. Not bad series or movies by any means, but only a very small part of a much more diverse selection Japan had to offer, tailored to the tastes of western nerds and not too strange.

These days, even if the official supply is still somewhat limited, the internet and various not quite legal solutions can get the dedicated anime fan everything they want. Now myself I’ve never been a hardcover anime or manga fan, being fairly conservative in my tastes, depending on the recommendations of others for cool new series. Which is how I discovered things like FLCL or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but not the anime series I’ve just started to watch: Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai or AnoHana for short, which means “we still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day” and which is somewhat different from most series I watch because it has gotten reactions like this

I accidently ran across some fan art for the series when googling something else, read the inevitable Wikipedia writeup and hunted down the episodes on the strength of it.

The story is simple: a group of childhood friends, young children, drift slowly apart as they grow into teenagers. One of them, Menta, never grew up however as she died in an accident on that day they found the flower. Now the guy who had been the closest to her, Jinta, is haunted by her memory, not to mention her ghost, who wants him to fulfill her wish she had asked him about the day she died. He needs to bring back the group to do so and move her spirit on, but this isn’t easy as they each have gone their own ways. How much do you have in common with the kids you played with when you were eight now that you no longer see them anymore and you’re in high school?

It’s a very adult in the proper sense of the word, low key, emotional and gut wrenching story about dealing with loss and memory. Any wonder it appeals to me right now?

Three weeks ago last night

Published on November 28, 2011Leave a comment

sandra in her wheelchair a few weeks before she died

I don’t sleep well on Sunday nights anyway, leftover anxiety from high school “ohshitit’smondaybacktoschoolnooo!” bubbling up, but since Sandra died it has become even more difficult. It was after all the night from Sunday to Monday that she died and I was woken up with the news. Three weeks on it’s still incredibly weird not to have my life intertwined with hers anymore. This weekend was also the first I was alone since she died, without my family or friends or work to distract me. I like having time on my own, to do what I like and not have to take anybody else into account, but this was different. I’ve never really lived on my own, moving out from my parents almost twenty years ago to move into student flats, moving out from there to live together with Sandra. Even when she was in hospital her presence was here. But now we’re three weeks on and I wonder how strong her presence still will be three weeks from now, three months, three years…

One thing that will keep her spirit alive so to speak is Radio 4. Sandra’s daily routine revolved around it, getting up with the Shipping Forecast, Farming Today, then getting annoyed with the Today Programme and listening to the morning shows while she did her business around the house until You and Yours came on, which like all right thinking people she disliked. Like Stephen Fry admitted to years ago in one of his books, Sandra had always been into Radio 4, a “young fogey”, but she grew to appreciate it even more being in a strange country building a new life. The Beeb was there as a lifeline with the old country.

In the evenings it was PM, the Six O’Clock news and finally the comedy, then we’d switch to the telly and Dutch news at eight. In the weekends was when the best programmes were on: Home Truth with John Peel until he died, Saturday Live and Broadcasting House, more comedy, the Archers omnibus (still the only radio programme to be regularly scheduled at Eastercons). the whole rhythm of the Sunday determined by it: I’d sleep in until the Archers would come on, then she’d made breakfast if I was lucky, I’d do the dishes, then reading blogs and do some chores and coffee when Gardening Question Time came on (which we saw live when it came to Amsterdam). But after news, comedy was what she liked best, ISIHAC (never the same without Humpf), the Now Show, Just a Minute, Dead Ringers, The Day Today, Fist of Fun, the various injokes, Mitch Benn and so on undsoweiter.

Late at night the radio would be switched back on as I went to bed, usually being the first to do so, while Sand still puttered around. If she was feeling poorly she would stay and listen as the programmes ended, the Shipping Forecast came back and finally broadcasts ended with Sailing By before the World Service came on. And I kick myself for not playing that at the funeral because it is the perfect music to say goodbye to.

The very model of a Gallifreyan buccaneer

Published on November 26, 2011Leave a comment

Though I quite like NuWho, I sort of miss the not quite so serious old Doctor Who, wobbling sets and all. I hope the next series will try a little less hard to top the previous ones, goes for more one-off adventures rather than having yet another universe destroying series long story arc and in general tries to do something new.

is this commercial racist?

Published on November 18, 2011Leave a comment

I saw this commercial for the first time on tv tonight and I thought, hang on, is this, if not quite racist, at least a bit dodgy? Beheaded male and female Black bodies and stereotypical African imagery, all very sensual to sell a brand of chocolate called Afrodisiac? When the reality of chocolate production even in 2011 still depends for a frighteningly large extent on slave labour, including child labour in cocoa production in West Africa? To be fair Kraft foods, the owner of Cote d’Or, has signed the socalled Cocoa protocol which aims to child labour in cocoa production altogether, but as the Wikipedia article says, “ten years after implementation, it is unclear if the protocol had any effect in reducing child labor”.

So yeah, it makes me a bit uncomfortable watching this.

Sandra’s music

Published on November 8, 2011Leave a comment

So much of the music I like today was formed through Sandra’s tutoring. She was a child of the seventies as I was of the eighties, but much more involved in music and listening to music than I ever was. So she told me of the time she saw Blondie perform in Plymouth at a time when nobody knew them yet, of going to see Depeche Mode in Atlanta when she lived there because you went to every English band coming over because not so many English bands hit Georgia back then, of dancing in the Wigan Casino and other near-mythical discotheques. She collected music and rare records at a time when that didn’t mean having a large hard drive and a fast internet connection, when you still had to hunt for that import single in scruffy record stores in dodgy neighbourhoods, building up a massive collection of vinyl, then losing it all when one of her uncles cleared out her father’s house after his death…

In day to day life she prefered to have the radio on (BBC radio 4, natch) rather than have music on in the background, having to a certain extent grown tired of it, or at least having it on all the time. She wasn’t really interested anymore in being nerdy obsessive about her music, though was still open to new stuff. She liked hip-hop, funk, pop music like the Style Council, baroque composers like Handel or Telemann but not twentieth century composers like Stravinsky, jazz of course, everything that sounded mellifluous, so Dutch language songs were right out…

She introduced me to everything from Ann Peebles, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye, the Brothers Johnson and George Benson (which would always recall summer holidays in France with her parents for her), Chaka Khan/Rufus, Outkast, De La Soul, Digible Planets, Dizzee Rascal, The Streets, Billie Holliday, Ella, Half Man Half Biscuit, and so on unsoweiter.