Regina Glei's Blog, page 36

Re-learning how to drive a car – part 1

Hya!!! I’ve been driving for the first time in 15 years or so today!

A lady instructor in her late 40ties or early 50ties came to my house with a white Toyota Corona (I don’t know if they are sold outside of Japan, there ain’t a big difference to the Corolla though = a sedan) and after a short interview of how long not driving etc. and p inside the car, she took me down to the main road in my area: a 4 lane street with the long name of Shittekurokawa that goes from Kawasaki station 15 km away to I don’t know yet where and she parked at the side of the road. She said, okay, let’s change seats.

What??? HERE??? I thought we start at a more quiet place! She shrugged and said it’s better to start here, daijoubu da yo (it’s all right).

So we changed seats and she explained mirrors and “bure-ki” (brake) and “akuseru” (short for acceleration) and “aizu” (eyes = blinker/signal) to me and then said drive! I’ll take care of left and right and will watch our backs, I have a brake here and I’ll lunge into your steering wheel if something goes wrong, you watch ahead and go!

Kyaaaaa! And so I went off in the midst of heavy traffic. Holy crap! I got a feel for the brake and gas quite quickly though and she was lauding my smooth stopping and going.

Handling the steering wheel was a bit more challenging for me and I have the tendency to turn it either too much or not enough! lol. For working on that, we left the scary big road and hit the smaller side streets and she made me go around a small park in circles (= four corners) several times to give me a feel for the steering wheel, then back onto the big road and I drove myself home eventually.

I am starting to believe her that actually the big roads are less scary than the small ones, since on the big roads you can go mostly straight or have only soft curves, there is hardly a threat of children jumping into the road and other surprises, etc. In the side streets you have to watch out for “everything”.

My radar is yet very limited and mostly directed forward, I’m not looking at mirrors etc. enough yet, but hey, this was my first time behind the wheel in 15 years or so. I also have a tendency to hang out too much to the left, since that’s the far side of the car for us here and I am lacking overview over the vehicle’s dimensions.

I bought now the “master plan” and we’ll do the whole show, parking in small spaces, parking in a park-house somewhere, gasoline station, highway, driving at night etc. I’ll have two instructors, the lady and also a guy, but it was good for my nerves that the first lesson was with a lady, I must say From now on, I don’t mind and next lesson will probably be next Saturday, awaiting confirmation.

It was pretty cool though to drive over the big, fat Shittekurokawa road, I really had not thought I would do that in my first lesson and that it would actually go reasonably well.

But after those two hours of driving – man! I’m exhausted and slowly coming down from the adrenaline here

If all goes well my course will be finished by the end of November and then the plan is to buy a Japanese mini-car!

Go, go, go!

Modern Times Adventures – a Japanese driver’s license

Today a (long) entry about real life – not books

The situation: I made my driver’s license in Germany some time in the late 90ties but have never yet owned a car or driven a lot. In fact I never liked driving, especially not in Germany where drivers are notoriously impatient and where there are sections on the famous autobahn without speed limit and the fat Porsches and Benzes are whipping past you with 200 km/h.

I have this uncomfy experience of wanting to stay in practice, renting a car and driving around with it for a bit on my own over non-autobahn overland highways where the speed limit was 80 km/h and there was this guy hanging five cm behind my bumper because he wanted to drive 90 or 100 or whatever and could not overtake me for some reason. This pressure and the danger freaked me out and I never enjoyed driving.

Then I moved to Japan and having a car in Tokyo is not really necessary and expensive too. Trains go everywhere and the streets of Tokyo are notoriously congested and parking downtown costs a fortune.

So why do I want to get a driver’s license in Japan now? Well, mostly thinking about the future. I have this vision of one day living on a lonely island or a region where there are less people than in Tokyo and thus also less public transport. Of course this plan is only in the far future, since I am still bloody young and have yet many years of lovely work to look forward to! Nevertheless, redoing a driver’s license after retiring did not seem like a very good idea to me, so I’d rather do it now.

The trigger for that was more or less my visit to the island of Oshima last May. No car – you are screwed. One bus per hour and not to everywhere on the island and it was too big for a bicycle, at least for my terms of riding a bicycle, which is 10 or 15 km a day, not 50. It would have been awesome to be able to rent a car and explore the island with it and when I want to live in a place like this some day I better become mobile again.

The gauntlet: The first thing I did was going to a driving school which happens to be in some 10 min bicycle distance from me. They have a practice course behind their main building and more or less every day while bicycling home from the station I see their practice cars driving around the area.

I was surprised when I entered the main building of the school, it looks very much like a hospital or a mayor’s office with a waiting hall and an administrative section behind which hover people in work uniforms.

I talked at first to one of the front desk ladies, a young woman of maybe 25 and I explained to her that a) I want to get a Japanese license, b) I have an old German license and what to do.

She explained to me that if I joined the school I’d have two options, either pretend I had no German license and do the entire show from scratch including theory test in Japanese and then the driving exam, or I could make use of my German license and take only lessons at the school to refresh, but for that purpose I’d need to transcribe my German license to a Japanese one and of course she did not know how to do that.

She went back to her boss several times and in the end he came forth to the front desk himself and very kindly explained to me where to call and that I should definitely try to get my German license transcribed, since that would be much cheaper than doing the whole show from scratch. I was surprised by how friendly he and also the girl were and that they were trying to safe me money instead of making money off me by trying to persuade me to do the action from scratch.

The very Japanese style office of the school made me grin, they seem to operate very much like a Japanese bank. Young folk at the front desk, the bosses sitting a few meters behind them hiding behind piles of files mounting on their desks and for every out-of-the ordinary question, the young folk has to go back to the bosses to ask what to do.

Well, on the next working day I called the Driver’s License department of Kanagawa prefecture where I live and here is what Germans need to do to get their German driver’s license transferred to a Japanese one.

The good news is that in principle Germans don’t need a test – yeah!

But they need the following (and not only Germans, generally all Europeans)

1) You original driver’s license

2) An official translation of that driver’s license into Japanese provided either by the translation department of your embassy or by a thing called the JAF – the Japan Automobile Federation

3) Passport

4) Residence Card (that’s our visa here)

5) A paper from the city of Kawasaki that I am actually living there (need to get it from the mayor’s office)

6) And now the best one: I need to proof that I lived in Germany for at least three consecutive months after getting my driver’s license (don’t ask me why. In such cases the question why is futile ) lol. I can either proof this via three original consecutive salary slips that contain my name, my birthday, the period for which I was paid and the name of the company, or I can ask the company to write me a letter that I worked for them in Germany from time x till y.

Kya! (Japanese expression of surprise, astonishment, or OMG)

If any of these documents is missing, you cannot get a Japanese driver’s license (the only alternative then being that you attend a driving school from scratch including theory exam in Japanese and driving exam). Now is that Kafkaesque or not?

So, after a month of getting all papers together, I went to the drivers license center for the prefecture of Kanagawa. It’s somewhere in the south of Yokohama at a station with the tongue twister name of Futamatagawa.

Arrived there you have to walk for some ten or fifteen minutes to get to the place. It’s a section of the police and the building is from the 60ties, at least it looks like that, I might do it injustice and it’s from the 70ties and it has this distinctive “official” feel = as customer-unfriendly as possible.

It took me a while to find the “foreign driver’s license exchange” corner and arrived there I had to first of all put my name on a list. Next to the list was a note saying that they accept only ten people in the morning and ten people in the afternoon.

They also accept people only between 08:30 and 09:00 in the morning. I arrived at about 8:15 and was already number ten on the list. They eventually accepted some thirteen or fourteen people but they turned away one Brazilian lady who came shortly before nine. She was understandably not very happy about having gone there for nothing and argued with the police man at the reception window…

You give them your bunch of papers when it’s your turn and at a quarter past nine they close the window. Then they retreat and open another window where they call people to when they want more information and ask you questions.

I only went quickly to the convenience store on the premises and returned to the waiting hall, expecting questions like: you’re living here for 13 years already. Why do you want a Japanese license only now? But none the like came! In true official fashion – she’s got all her papers right so here’s your license they gave me one at a few minutes before 12

I was one of only two people though that day who were exempt from tests, the other person being a guy from Taiwan. Several Chinese were there, a lady from Thailand, one from Pakistan, a guy from the US, a lady from Bolivia. They all had to do a small theory test and then a driving test and I sat next to the lady from Pakistan who looked at the explanation papers they had given her with a very grave face. Man, am I glad I’m from a country that doesn’t have to do the testing! Most European countries plus South Korea and Taiwan don’t have to do the test, funnily enough, because of a bureaucratic glitch, the US are not exempt…

So, now that I got the important card, next thing will be taking paper driver lessons!

I went back to the school next door but they had bad news for me. They have so many regular students that at the moment they are not providing lessons for paper drivers. A bit disappointed I took to the Internet and there is nothing that does not exist in Tokyo.

Even a short search revealed five specific “paper driver schools” where they advertise exactly what I need – you haven’t driven in 15 years? Don’t worry – we’ll get you there. An instructor comes to your home and picks you up and you drive to a place where it’s quiet and not much traffic and there he starts with you from scratch and the courses involve something like they help you parking in your own garage, go with you to your favorite shopping center and park there, go with you onto the express way and so forth. So it seems I was lucky that the school next door was closed for paper drivers due to overflow.

I called the best looking school today and I’ll have my first lesson right away tomorrow! kyaaaaaaa! I’ll keep you posted

Announcing “To Mix and To Stir”

Here it is! Part two of my Hagen Patterson, Alchemist, trilogy “To Mix and To Stir” is out and available in print version (Kindle to follow in a few weeks).

For me this book is special in several ways.

First of all, when I wrote its predecessor “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” I had planned it as a stand-alone and it had a “final” ending. I workshopped the book and one of my critiquers told me she’d prefer if he = Hagen didn’t die! That’s right – in the original “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” a governmental agent kills Hagen!

In the version that is in print now, however, he escapes his exploding house.

That left me with unanswered questions – the biggest of which being: who is Alberich or “Al”, the “demon” that lived inside Emma since the night of Hagen’s conception.

Yes, I admit it, while writing “Siegfried” I did not know myself who Al was.

I brooded for a while over who he is. As long as I wasn’t clear on that, I wouldn’t have a story. But then, finally, Al revealed himself to me and my first reaction was – Al, you gotta be fxxing kidding me!

But that was it, the cat was out of the bag, and I had to take the challenge. And while writing especially “Hagen 3″ Al proved to be indeed who he claims to be at the end of “To Mix and To Stir”.

“To Mix and To Stir” and its successor “Hagen 3 (title yet a secret)” are much closer connected than “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” is to “To Mix and To Stir”.

The time gap between “Siegfried” and “Mix and Stir” is thirteen years, since I wanted to show Hagen as a father. He has three children now, Richard, who is twelve and three quarters, Will, ten, and Helena, seven, and they very much define the “new” Hagen.

The time gap between “To Mix and To Stir” and “Hagen 3” is a few hours. So, in that way you can say “To Mix and To Stir” and “Hagen 3” are much closer together also thematically than “Siegfried” and “Mix and Stir” are.

I kept the structure for all three books = three main POVs and some agent reports, although the agent reports are fading out (deliberately, you’ll see why when you read it) in “Mix and Stir”, and disappearing in “Hagen 3”.

The main POV characters in “Siegfried” were Hagen of course, Hagen’s mother Emma, and the first-person-present-tense account of Helena Sears, Hagen’s cancerous potion customer (and the namesake of his daughter Helena).

In “Mix and Stir” the POVs are Hagen, his apprentice (well, candidate) Lana and a mysterious first-person-present-tense lady who has something to do with Al…

It was fascinating for me to see how huge the impact of keeping a certain structure actually is. Your POV characters determine everything. That might sound obvious and maybe it is, but it nevertheless was a revelation to me, since in “Siegfried” the structure developed organically, whilst in “Mix and Stir” and “Hagen 3” it was a given fact and I had to arrange the story so that it would fit into this structure.

Rather than restrictive, I found that challenging and inspiring and it made me think clearly about how to give what kind of information when in a more organized way.

The other thing that struck me while writing “Mix and Stir” was its tendency towards horror and I have added the “horror” tag next to the “contemporary fantasy” tag. Now whose fault is that? Al’s of course! Just joking. The circumstances Hagen finds himself in have tugged the balance a bit onto the horror side. However, I also think that “Mix and Stir” has more funny moments than “Siegfried”. I’m only mentioning one word here: fluffy

Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy reading “To Mix and To Stir” as much as I did enjoy writing it! And that the cliffhanger at the end will make you want to read “Hagen 3” as well, whose first draft is already completed and that will come out next year.

Publishing Pains – but “To Mix and To Stir” is out now!

So, finally it is done and I pressed the „publish“ button for „To Mix and To Stir“ – the second part of my Hagen Patterson, Alchemist, trilogy.

It was/is my third book with Createspace, Amazon’s self-publishing service, and it has been the worst of the three experiences as far as the publishing process was concerned.

The essence is that Createspace’s service has dropped significantly in quality and speed compared to two years ago, when I first put out my “Dome Child” novel via this channel.

The process has slowed from two months to over three months and there have been many frustrating faults and errors along the way.

I don’t know why the response times of Createspace has become so bad – do they have so many jobs now that they can’t keep up with demand anymore?

Anyway, it took weeks and weeks for them to produce a first sample of the Interior and that looked crappy as hell. It was like no human had ever thrown a glance at it, but someone had just pushed a Word document to “whatever they use” format conversion button and then on the print button of the print-on-demand machine. Nevertheless it took weeks for someone to press those two buttons.

Then they got confused about my request for interior design changes. One round of up to 200 changes “for free” is part of the package I purchased and they forgot that, wanted to charge me another 55,- USD for implementing the changes and when I protested, they said something like sorry, was a mistake and reimbursed the stuff to my credit card after having deducting it.

The implementation of the change request round took then again some three weeks instead of “7 business days” as stated in the member dashboard. It was more than double that time and if I had not asked what the hell was going on, they might have let me wait even longer. Then conflicting messages about the release of the documents got on my nerves too, another 7 business days (for what??) vs. 3 days, etc…

Another annoying issue is the cover design. In my case it is ridiculously overpriced. You pay the same for them designing you a cover from scratch as when you hand in a cover design as in my case and only want them to put the title on it. I told them so in a message but got no reply. So I am paying double for the cover – I’m paying my cover artist as well as for putting the title and my name onto it. Since “To Mix and to Stir” is a second in a series I wanted the same font and even told them the font name. Nevertheless, a work that takes in my opinion half an hour, took them again weeks to fulfill. Since the Interior wasn’t ready either, it was not critical, but…

The worst thing about Amazon is that there is no real alternative – that’s the dangers of having a monopoly. Since we are dependent on Amazon, they now think they can do whatever they want… very frustrating and sad and annoying for those who depend on their service. I wish I had an alternative, but there is none. I met some new people recently and told them about my books and the very first question was: can you order them via Amazon? = no alternative.

You could speed up the process by doing it all yourself, I suppose, but I neither have the time nor the nerve to learn “interior formatting”, or Kindle conversion, or how to get the title onto the cover art.

So… the struggle will stay the same… at least I am now prepared for a lousy, time consuming, not-enough-value-for-money-process for next time and I’ll calculate at least three months instead of two…

That was the publishing rant… In another “five to seven business days” (reason for this long time period unknown) the title will hopefully be available in print form (no clue yet how long they’ll let me wait until the Kindle version is ready). “To Mix and To Stir” is already available via the CreateSpace store, but I guess you need yet another ID for that one.

Once the title has shown up on Amazon I can make a happier blog entry about more important things = the contents, the story, the exciting further adventures of my weird dark hero Mr. Hagen Patterson, Alchemist

Climbing Sky Trees

I finally went up my birthday tree! Now what does that mean?

The Tokyo Sky Tree – a 634 meter high tower and thus the at the moment highest in the world (not counting the highest building in Dubai of course) was opened on the 22nd of May 2012. Now the 22nd of May happens to be my birthday Thus I feel a certain connection to the tower. I entered the lottery to get onto the viewing platform of the thing but of course lost. Nevertheless I took a day off last year for my birthday and went to see the opening craze. Lucky me that I did not have a ticket to go up, since I would have seen zero… it was raining like hell on that day and the top of the tower, including the viewing platform, was shrouded in clouds.

Ever since, I had this – I must try to get onto the Sky Tree finally – plan, but as things go I just didn’t come around to it. I tried again to book a ticket over New Year 2013 but came too late and everything was booked out again.

Now it happened that I attended an external 2 day seminar which took place only five subway stations away from the Sky Tree and when I saw the beast on the 19th from the 10th floor of the conference building in all its glory, I made the spontaneous decision to try to get up after the seminar was over for the day.

Thus, unprepared, only equipped with my iPhone camera and dragging my work buggy bag behind me, I rushed to Oshiage station after the seminar and neither looking left nor right straight through the “Sola Machi” shopping center to the Sky Tree entrance in the falling dusk. Going there on a weekday is the best thing still. No clue how long the day-ticket queue is during the weekend. The hall in front of the ticket booth is quite enormous (you see only a fraction of it on the pic at Flickr) and filled with meandering rails to keep the crowd in check. A sign at the day ticket entrance promised an only 20-30 min wait. Very good.

The elevator up to the main viewing platform at 350m is a work of engineering art in itself. You don’t feel a single vibration while the elevator shoots up to 350m in 55 seconds at a peak speed of 600m/min. Even the ear plopping is not so bad.

The main viewing platform is huge and I arrived at the last bits of sunset facing east. Due to the masses of people it took some time to reach the west facing side of the tower, which looks at Shinjuku and dusk had proceeded quite a lot until I got there.

You can check out a whole series of photos on my Flickr account. One peculiarity of the Sky Tree is that it has no significant higher buildings standing around it. The 200m or so high buildings of Shinjuku are pretty far away and almost did not stand out in the sea of lights. The only higher building close by is the Tokyo Sky Tree East Tower that looks tiny from above despite its 30 floors.

Of course I had to go up to the second viewing platform at 450m height. You can only purchase a ticket to get further up on the 350m height station. By the way, to get up to 350m costs 2000 Yen (20 USD) and further up to 450m an additional 1000 Yen.

The elevator further up is pretty awesome. When you stand in its back you can look into the elevator shaft via a glass ceiling. It was lit in blue (wonder if they change color sometimes) and reminded me of a shaft of the Enterprise

When you stand at the doors you have the privilege to look out while going up, which is also great. You can’t really steer whether you end up at the door or the back of this elevator due to the masses of people and both times I was in the back. But over the heads of people I managed a shot out of the doors as well.

The second viewing platform is much smaller of course and less people than I thought bothered going up the final 100 meters so I enjoyed the second platform more than the first. From 450m height Tokyo looks pretty far away, almost like from aboard a plane, and in the meantime it had become truly dark. The sea of lights in every direction is only interrupted by black bands of rivers and the dark of Tokyo bay to the south. I found the view down the tower to the main viewing platform also very impressive.

The excellent weather had of course also played a role in deciding to spontaneously go up the tower and a big full moon shone down on the city. It even happened to be the special full moon of mid-autumn and people like to do moon-viewing and eat dumplings in Asia on that day. The photos do not do the moon justice, I’d have needed a better camera for that. It was a perfect and beautiful full moon. On the Shinjuku side even Venus was visible, if, due to the light “pollution”, not a single star.

Once you make the round around the tower and before lining up at the elevator to go down they had a funny thing happening which probably only works at night. They are projecting time, date, “welcome to Tokyo Sky Tree” and other nicknacks in white onto the night sky beyond (See Flickr pic of the date).

After arriving back at the 350m level I took a last few pics at the small glass floor section and road back down to the ground.

The Sky Tree is quite an amazing construct and I definitely want to go up again during full daylight. Let’s see if I don’t forget to book daytime tickets for the coming New Year season

Various “Great Gatsbys” Review

I have recently subjected myself to a Great Gatsby marathon. First I watched the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, then the Robert Redford movie and last but not least I read the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

It’s a good story but I wouldn’t give it five stars for one reason: Daisy.

The problem with the whole book and story in all three version for me is that in my opinion Daisy is not a likeable character. Why the heck does Jay Gatsby love this woman so much? She is shallow, selfish, materialistic and pretentious. She does not deserve to be loved in such a fierce and condition less manner as Gatsby loves her. The intensity of Gatsby’s feelings is awkward.

Maybe that’s the point, maybe what the author really wants to tell us is that all love is an illusion or rather, self-made. She doesn’t even need to be perfect, Gatsby makes her perfect in his mind. But when she rejects him in the hotel scene, a part of him has to realizes that his dream is far from reality. It would have been better for Gatsby had he never met her again, then he could have continue with his dream about her in which he constructs her to be his ideal woman.

But, if this is the main issue, if Daisy doesn’t need to be real, then I don’t get this message clearly enough. To bring this message across she either needs to be more ideal in “real” terms or she needs to be even nastier than as she is described now. The way the novel reads itself, Daisy Buchanan is neither fish nor meat and that is disappointing.

Let’s define fish as bad girl and meat as good girl for the moment.

If she were meat it would be wonderfully tragic that Gatsby was whipped to war or thought he needed to make more money to make her happy and by parental pressure or whatever she could not wait and married Tom. Now that would be a bit boring, since we have seen unhappy love stories like that manifold.

If she were fish she needed to be nastier and the gap between Gatsby’s ideal and her real self would be more obvious. She’d need fewer friends, fewer positive comments about her and the narrator, Nick, should like her less. She could do some bad stuff and yet Gatsby loves her and it would have been an act of masterly writing to bring that across in a convincing manner.

As you can probably already guess, the latter construction would, in my opinion, have made a much better novel.

For my taste, the novel is walking a too fine line between fish and meat that makes the actions and reactions of the people in it fuzzy and hard to identify with. Some may say that is the art of this novel and may find that to be appealing, for me though it’s not convincing or rather not consequent enough.

Anyway, it was a good object of study and I have the feeling I learned something about character building. I, by the way, still like the underplayed Redford version less than the more showing rather than telling DiCaprio version as far as the movie is concerned.

SF Movie Reviews – Prometheus, Into Darkness, etc.

I did some SF movie watching/catching up lately, and here are some short reviews:

Prometheus

I bought Prometheus for a 1000 yen (cheaper than watching it at the movies here) and luckily did not spend more money on it, since I am asking myself this: Why, oh why, Ridley Scott, did you think you had to make “Alien” again? First of all the movie contains a horde of overused SF plot-lines – humans meet superior species, superior species tries to kill us for no apparent reason, big company boss abuses his power… and so forth. Then, why again? Alien was great, let it be. Why the need to explain how the ship with the “navigator” got there and how/why it was infected by the “alien” species? Sometimes it is nice to have a prequel to understand how it all came to pass, but in the “Alien” case this seems so unnecessary. Now, if the original “Alien” had been a bad movie, I might still swallow that the director felt the need to make a “better” prequel. But the original “Alien” happens to be one of the best and most acclaimed SF/horror movies ever made and while making sequels is sort of a necessary evil this prequel seems like sacrilege to me.

Nothing can make up for the awesome scene where Kane “bears” the alien, also not the admittedly admirable action of the female lead getting into a med-box and having her alien surgically removed via caesarian section while being conscious and then stenciling the wound shut. Since there was Kane and his “child”, this in principle awesome scene just becomes a tired rip-off of the epic original. And that is, at least in my opinion true for the entire movie, it is a tired rip-off of its epic original and belongs into the category: movies that should not have been made.…

Oblivion

Well, the concept was not bad and the clarification at the end more or less cool, however the way to that one moment of coolness was much too long. Somehow the story was too thin and could have been told in half the time. This is the problem with let me call it “idea-based” science fiction. You have one cool idea and nothing more and then you are trying to make a novel out of it or a movie when in fact your one cool idea delivers only enough material for a short story. For me Oblivion was a classic example for that – spoiler alert. The one cool idea is that the Cruise character and his science officer or whatever function she served on their ship got captured by the evil aliens and they made thousand of clone copies of the two and sent a whole army of Cruises back down to earth without the copies knowing anything about each other and thinking they are all unique. All the other ideas, drone gone bad, destroyed planet, resistance fighters and evil aliens we have seen a million times before. In my opinion that one cool idea did not justify a full movie.

Cloud Atlas

Interesting, but I don’t think I understood it. I could not see a connection between the six or so stories in different time periods. Maybe I was too tired, the screen in the airplane was too small or I did not understand everything due to the lousy sound quality on a plane, but I for my part did not see a connection between those stories. Each story in itself was interesting to a varying degree and it was fun to see the same actors all over again in different costumes, especially Hugo Weaving as a bad-ass female nurse in the old people are breaking out of an asylum story was hilarious, but no clue what that asylum story had to do for example with Neo Soul. Also, the Neo Soul story was just a tired rip-off of the classic Soylent Green.

I would have liked to understand the big picture and it would have been cool if there had been one, if anybody got it, let me know.

One other remark though, I did not like the characters in this movie too much. They were all too much victims and passive and suffering needlessly. Why did the guy with the music piece kill himself? His motivation was not apparent to me. The guy who got poisoned on the sailing ship just lay around suffering, not once asking why and trying to end his suffering, his black friend had to do all that for him. Tom Hanks in the last episode as well, instead of whining, do something. He does in the end, but less whining would have made this character more likable. So, if anybody can tell me what the red thread was in those six or so stories I’d be grateful, I haven’t discovered it.

John Carter of Mars

Hmmmm…. Nice piece of science fantasy but I am not surprised that it flopped. Though this story might have been sensational in its time and though George Lucas has massively taken story elements from it, the thing is that Star Wars is thirty years old and to shoot something like John Carter of Mars now was just the wrong time. Had it been released instead of Star Wars it would have become cult I suppose, but not thirty, almost forty years on and not after the horrible Phantom Menace which had all the desert chases and aliens that resemble the Tharks. It’s a nice story and its well done, but it just comes forty years too late.

And now the highlight!

Star Trek – Into Darkness

I sat in the “Star Trek” from 2010 with the new crew expecting to hate it, but then the movie turned me around and I loved it, especially the new Spock, Uhura, Bones and Scotty. Therefore my expectations to this second movie with the new crew were very high.

It was a good movie but I am a little disappointed that they rehashed Khan Noonien Singh yet again.

It was a strike of genius to revive him in the “Wrath of Khan” and I agree that “Wrath of Khan” is one of the best Star Trek movies as general opinion seems to be. It was dangerous to revive the story yet again and considering that danger they did quite well, but nevertheless this second movie with the new crew did not surpass the first.

Though quite different in appearance than Ricardo Montalban, Benedict Cumberbatch did a great job personifying Khan. But the recurring theme of the gone bad admiral was boring and in general I was disappointed that they didn’t find anything else to rehash. To revive it once = Wrath of Khan = awesome, to do so yet another time?…

There are plenty of other story threads the writers could have picked up.

The parallels to Wrath of Khan notably the sacrifice of Kirk instead of Spock were thus predictable and did not produce an ounce of emotion.

It threw me though totally how Kirk was realigning the warp coil – banging with his feet against delicate equipment in high radiation, what hilarious nonsense.

All in all the movie was fun and had some great elements and funny puns but the first with the new crew was definitely better.

Here is my personal Star Trek movie ranking by the way:

First Contact

Wrath of Khan

The Voyage Home

Star Trek (new crew)

(Everybody hated it but I liked) Nemesis

Into Darkness

The Undiscovered Country

Generations

Search for Spock

Insurrection

Star Trek the motion picture

The Final Frontier

What’s your ranking?

Weltschmerz?

Something serious and very personal for a change after all the heavy metal fun.

So I’ve been to Prague recently and visited the Kafka museum and his relationship to his hometown made me think about my own. There was a quote somewhere in the museum in the lines of Prague is like claws that do not let him go. I felt those claws too, my hometown, whose name I cannot even write because it gives me the creeps and makes me shudder, clawed me in and Germany in genera as well.

I do not remember a single moment or a single aspect of my hometown that I like, its claws smothered me and I always had the strong urge to get away from it.

I managed with 19 and never looked back. Ever since I am 19, I only went back to the place for a few hours at a time to visit relatives every few years. I never even spent another single night there and do not intend to do so in the future either. (Luckily, also my sister does not live in our hometown anymore).

Next, I lived in Munich, which I like, but I still felt the claws of Germany looming over me.

Now, why is that so, where do these claws come from?

My hometown is the most boring, backwater, conservative, conventional place I have ever seen. I was a heavily bullied outsider and I am still one, though not bullied anymore ever since I left the place. The town’s conformity, play-by-the-rules, never out-of-the-box etc., attitude choked me and would have killed me in one or the other form had I stayed.

Munich was big enough and diverse enough to let me breathe, but the claws of being German in Germany and having to follow its rules still remained. Germany weighed me down simply by being Germany.

I escaped the claws of Germany now for a total of 14 years.

I am not returning often, but when I do it feels extremely weird that I was born in this country. Although I was born there, it has never been “my” country, it has never been my home, not really.

It feels strange, like clothes that don’t fit, atonal to my ears, there is this screeching, the smell of the air, the looks of things that is alien to me and that has never been mine.

The sight of a Japanese house puts me at ease, the sight of a German house, although bigger, roomier, makes me shudder. It does not feel right, the roofs are too sharp, the walls too big and sturdy, the windows too much like squares. The cows are too black and white, the wind farms of Schleswig Hollstein are too much looking like War of the Worlds Marsians or Gundam. And the people… waiting for my flight from Amsterdam to Hamburg, I talked briefly to a German mother with her son, who was just coming from Los Angeles. She asked me where I came from, Tokyo… Q: Oh, wow, how was it? A: I wasn’t there on holidays, I live there. Q (with a puzzled face) Why?

German mother – why do you ask me why? Any other nationality I think, I suppose, I believe, says to a comment like that: “Oh, really?” or “Wow” but not “Why”? In that single question is so much Germany. Why…? I’d like to shake people like that and throw back at them “Why not?” Germans: please think more in terms of “why not” instead of “why”.

Then, the first thing I hear upon arrival at Hamburg airport, waiting at the baggage claim is two girls talking: “I’m so afraid my suitcase won’t come out” – “Ich hab so Angst, dass mein Koffer nicht rauskommt”. Negative, negative, negative, too many Germans are too negative. The tone of her voice, the intonation, the stress on certain words, it sends chills down my spine, it makes me squirm in my innermost self, it makes me want to go home… home… Japan is not my home country and yet it is so much more home than Germany ever was. I’ve never been “homesick”, at least not for Germany.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Germany, but it’s just not my home. It held me in its claws, but I managed to escape them. I feel much better about Germany since I did escape those claws. There is maybe too much “Weltschmerz” in Germany, which I never felt. There is no perfect translation for this very German term. “World weariness” or “sentimental pessimism” the dictionary says, or just “weltschmerz” also in English for those who understand this word.

I don’t think I ever had this “weltschmerz” or if I have it, then in a non-German way. Kafka had it though, I felt that during the exhibition in his museum. If you feel too much “weltschmerz” maybe you cannot escape from the claws, at least he couldn’t.

And so I am back in Tokyo, moaning about the long summer and the heat and the humidity, worried about earthquakes and Fukushima, but when I walk from the office to the station for example, it feels like “my” place, that I belong here. The ride on the bicycle from the station to my home makes me feel at ease, and I know that I am supposed to be here.

This is what it means to me to travel – moments like that, insights like that: you don’t get them when you do not leave the house. You don’t live them and realize them when you stay in your castle.

I think I am a lucky person that I can live where I feel at home, not without problems and ups and downs of course, but without “weltschmerz”.

Metal Festival Nikki: Part 6 – Dinkelsbuehl to Narita

Since it was Saturday, breakfast times were extended until 10:00 in the morning at our hotel, and we finally had breakfast there and it was astonishingly luxurious. Then I packed all my stuff, hid the pink brick in my sister’s trunk and we went back on the road to look for Summer Breeze. The landscape remained unchanged, lonely, middle of nowhere farms and some sleepy villages and finally in the middle of all this nowhere, metal heads again!

The daily parking lot was just outside the daily ticket gate and my sister had luckily no problem getting a ticket and thus something to do for a day

Luckily, or unfortunately, it was insanely hot again if not as hot as in Wacken or Jaromer. At least in the shadow it was a bit cooler than in Wacken, but in the sun it was more or less unbearable. It had been dry in the south of Germany for quite a while and instead of mud, Summer Breeze fought with another problem – dust! So, in a way I’ve had it all, heat, rain, mud, dust – it feels like I’ve spent my holidays in the wilderness

My sister and I did some reconnaissance and went onto a shopping spree afterwards. I got two of the silver rings on my fingers here, notably the long one on the left pointer finger and yet another black t-shirt and also my sister got into shopping mood and bought a black t-shirt, a pendant and a leather bracelet.



We fled into the party tent where there was beloved shadow and hung out there, waiting for the sun to go down. The party tent is Summer Breeze’s smallest stage. The main stage is simply called Main Stage to set it apart from the Pain Stage. The main bands alternate between those two stages.

Summer Breeze is a “normal” festival in metal terms and though of course smaller than Wacken, has a Wacken-like atmosphere and the crowd behaves like a metal crowd should. They scream, they shout, they mosh-pit and they crowd surf. I had the impression crowd surfing was very popular at Summer Breeze. Somehow you need mud to properly mosh-pit and not dust So the Summer Breeze crowd compensated for the missing mud with loads crowd surfing and sings tribute songs to the security guys in the pit. The crowd calls them “Grabenschlampen” = pit sluts, lol, and they take it with a smile and bowed to us and fired us up to sing “Grabenschlampen”

By now the festival atmosphere felt refreshingly normal to me, but alas, not for everyone. Like Wacken, Summer Breeze gives for-free tickets to locals and while I had not seen any locals in Wacken, my sister and I discovered a not clad-in-black elderly couple wandering in wonder around the tents and stalls and stages, looking a bit scared at the aliens that had landed among them. I can understand that they felt as overwhelmed by us as I felt the day before, glimpsing into their world…

The notable acts of the day were Devildriver, Hatebreed, Ensiferum, Amorphis and In Flames, though my sister and I had to leave during In Flames, since I had to get back to Frankfurt that night. My flight back to Japan went the next morning.

Somehow I forgot to take a lot of photos that day, maybe because it was too hot or I had gotten used to the scenes before my eyes at festivals but here are a few on Flickr again.

Alternating stages are the open secret to a festival’s success. The bands have enough time to set up while another one plays next door and the audience is constantly occupied. Summer Breeze was excellently organized in that fashion and left nothing to complain about.

It felt unreal to leave the metal world to go back home but I could sober up a bit during the long ride to Frankfurt. Germany is bigger than one might think. We were in a hotel at Frankfurt airport only at 2 in the morning. Thanks to my sister for all the driving!

After having slept only for some four hours, my sister and I had to get up again and I flew from Frankfurt to Paris and then on to Tokyo. As expected getting from one terminal to the other was no fun at Charles de Gaulle airport and I made it to the gate to Tokyo just ten minutes or so before boarding started. The machine to fly me home though was as hoped for an airbus A380. My first time on board the big whale. I must say I am surprised at the lift off. While it seems a Boeing 747 takes forever to get off the ground and rattles like it’s coming apart, the fat airbus lifted off like it was nothing and that in what seemed a ridiculously low speed. Seats in economy are as crammed though as in other aircrafts. Anyway, nice to finally have been on board an A380.

In total, what a trip. From Germany to the Czech Republi, to England via Germany and back to Germany.

It was good to meet my sister again and it was awesome to get this overview over European metal festivals and to have been for the first time at the legendary Wacken Open Air. I am not tired of festivals and already have the ticket to “our” one here in Japan – Loudpark: 19./20. of October

And my very own and personal festival ranking (SB = Summer Breeze, BA = Brutal Assault):

Category: Ranking: 1st = excellent, 2nd = good, 3rd = soso, 4th = hmmmmm

Best line-up: Wacken, SB/BA, no 3rd, Bloodstock

Best organized (for the audience): BA, Wacken/SB, no 3rd, Bloodstock

Best sound: SB, Wacken/BA, no 3rd, Bloodstock

Coolest audience: Wacken, SB, BA, Bloodstock

Best merch: Wacken, BA, SB, Bloodstock

Best goodie bag: Wacken, BA, SB, Bloodstock

(in Wacken every guest got: a rucksack, fridge magnet, badge, key holder, ear plugs, poster, shower gel, detergent, rubbish bag, sticker, condom, cloth patch),

(at BA: plastic festival schedule on neck strap, DVD from year before),

(at SB: earplugs),

(at Bloodstock: nothing)

Best toilets: Wacken, SB/BA, no 3rd, Bloodstock

Best food: BA, SB, Wacken, Bloodstock

Best drinks: BA (0.5l), SB (0.4l), Wacken (0.3l), Bloodstock (no cups, just plastic bottles)

Best venue: BA, Wacken, SB, Bloodstock

Best pit sluts: SB, Wacken, BA, Bloodstock



Cheers!

Metal Festival Nikki: Part 5 – Lichfield to Dinkelsbuehl

After sleeping in at my sister’s home following my arrival from the UK, some family action, and a very important piece of work: washing clothes, my sister and I traveled south with her car to a city called Crailsheim. Crailsheim lies in the middle of the triangle formed by Wuerzburg, Nuernberg and Stuttgart, almost or over 100 km away from either city and is sort of the center of German nowhere. Crailsheim itself has an amazing 33,000 inhabitants.

Why did we go there? Well, because it lies 20 km from my eventual goal, the even smaller town of Dinkelsbuehl, host to the Summer Breeze Metal festival.

Our hotel was okay, but the staff, a grandpa of over 60, was monstrously German, meaning being ridiculously unfriendly and grouchy at the check in. We explored the town on foot for a bit to find it completely dull, deserted and provincial. Well, other people might call it idyllic, quiet and peaceful… But, not my sister and me… We ate at a Greek restaurant, one of three decent eateries we could find, two of them being Greek, one Italian. I had wanted some German food for a change, but…

Breakfast in our hotel happened on weekdays from 6:30 till 9:00. Since we were on holidays, however, 9:00 was about when we got up! We didn’t bother with getting up earlier to meet the breakfast slot. Instead we went to a bakery we had discovered the night before for coffee and pastry. That satisfied, we rode by car to the “romantic road” town of Rothenburg, which is a famous tourist spot, especially popular with Japanese and American tourists.

It’s a medieval town which has not been destroyed during WW2. We had seen everything after about half a day, the town not being that big and spent the time with eating ice cream and later on having a German dinner.

The main points to mention about Rothenburg were climbing onto the very steep and narrow mayor’s house tower, walking on the city walls around the town and discovering an enormously big “forever Christmas shop”, which allowed no photos (understandably) and was really huge and amazing to see. It contained easily two million Christmas related items if not more. The shop seemed to stretch on for forever and to be tunneling half of Rothenburg.

Here are some pics of the town.

In one of the tourist traps my sister almost bought a Klingon-like looking dagger and I ended up buying a toy stuffed dragon whose pic I tweeted from our hotel

In the evening, back in the hotel, we looked in the Internet for more stuff to do for the next day, but actually found nothing much! Wuerzburg etc. seemed a bit far away and we tried to find something close by but in this middle of nowhere this seemed quite a daunting task.

After the same pattern of the day before, having breakfast at a bakery instead of the hotel, we bothered a clothes shop, since the lady from the toy shop where I had bought the dragon had not bothered to un-clip the non-stealing magnet device from the wing of my poor beast. The dragon promptly beeped when we entered the shop but then a more or less friendly lady at the cashier managed to get the security thing off the dragon’s wing and we brought the freed dragon who by now listens to the name of Draki, back to the hotel and started our adventure of the day.

We had decided to drive to the city of Ansbach which promised a residence of the former earls of the area. We arrived in time for a tour through the residence at about 12:00 and it took an hour and a tour guide lady showed us some 30 rooms of the 500 rooms building. Unfortunately, but also here understandably, you were not allowed to take pictures. From outside the residence looks like nothing special and half of it is used for the district government. The other half though is more or less original from the 18th century. The earls demonstrated French style and the residence seems like a mini-version of Versailles. Most of the stuff was original and some 250 to 300 years old and I was mightily impressed with the modest building’s grand interior. You would not expect a castle like that in this town and inside this building.

After the tour we had lunch in the small but pretty garden of the place and were faced again with the question of what to do next. We had more or less seen what was worthy seeing in Ansbach (here are a glorious four pics). After some more ice cream, we decided to try to find the “nature preserve” advertised in the map of the area and to take a little walk there. On the way we found a castle called Colmburg in a small town of the same name and drove up there spontaneously, only to find that it was in private ownership and tours could only be arranged if you were the guests of the castle hotel. From outside it looked pretty cool though, see Flickr pics.

We rode on, in soaring heat by the way, and tried to find that nature preserve but instead found nothing but fields and villages. We even dared to drive off the main road in search for some nature but only found one village after the next between fields. Those villages consist of ten to twenty houses and I felt completely immersed in deepest and most conservative German country side. It was interesting, but my sister as well as myself were sorts of horrified. Neither of us would ever want to live in a place like this. Again, others might find it idyllic, romantic, quiet and beautiful, etc., but for me (and my sister as well) places like this mean, shackles, dead end, adhering to norms, being policed, dying in provincial horror… Such are the different perceptions, I suppose.

In the end we went back to our hotel place where we had dinner at the Italian restaurant.

Out of sheer frustration about having nothing to do in this provincial nothingness, my sister decided to dare to join me on the next day for Summer Breeze, trying to get a day ticket at the box office…