This time let's not do that.
I want to discuss, finally, the things I actually like for once.
A lot of you probably don't know what I'm into at all, from reading this, but not only do I have hobbies, but contrary to what you've probably heard, I actually enjoy them.
I write books as a hobby that might transfer into a living, it's not fanfiction and publishers have taken a peek over this thing over the years. I also like to read a lot of books but you're probably wondering what kind of books I like, so here goes:
Anything where a guy who's either a shut in or a creative person or some kind of wizard/warrior trying to do his bit to save the world is always good. My favourite book of all time is Welcome To The NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto, I think it's one of the greatest works of contemporary literature written in my lifetime. It's getting to the heart of a big problem in Japan where a lot of people feel isolated or become shut ins because they have social anxiety disorders, since I have an anxiety disorder it's really interesting to see a book written by a man who clearly gets the short end of the stick because Japan has an even worse track record of helping out the mentally ill than Australia does, at least Australia has some kind of Medicare to pay for meds at some level, Japan is a place where most drugs like Prozac aren't available so a lot of people there go it alone and Welcome To The NHK is about somebody who's a hikikomori or a shut in because of social anxiety who's right in the middle of this minefield. Part of the reason why I love this book so much isn't just because it deals with things I can relate to with social anxiety, but because I don't think many novels like this capture the essence of anime in the printed word quite like this one, it's like when you read it an anime explodes in word pictures inside your mind. You literally can't imagine it not being an anime because as the light novel format it is, it's heavily inspired by anime but it's a novel, yet it gets to the heart of what anime is capable of without a single illustration, it was adapted into an anime later but it's kinda weird to me that even now, light novels instead of manga are being adapted into anime rather than people having to draw to be a part of that cultural scene at all, it's really fascinating and exciting that something like Welcome To The NHK can be not just a novel that talks about heavy themes and problems of contemporary Japanese society, but it's also this cult classic to anime fans both in Japan and the West because it speaks to both fanbases in a way that some people, like this actually Japanese guy I met on an internet forum once who said something along the lines of "Welcome To The NHK is everything wrong with my country" - I earnestly think this guy completely missed the point of what Welcome To The NHK represents not just as a novelist's story about a shut in who ends up in this zany scheme with his pervert neighbour to make a hentai game which he agrees to because he wants to impress a girl he knows, but the hentai game they end up making is horrible, they fail at making something but their attempt at making something, even if it was terrible and kind of perverted, it was a valiant and noble triumph over the apathy and self loathing they had for themselves before. I think that's the part this Japanese guy I met on a forum didn't get about why Welcome To The NHK doesn't just speak to a Japanese audience, but to a Western one, cause Japan is very hardline on slackers and shut ins, doesn't allow them to thrive, but the Western world has a lot better safety nets for the slackers and shut ins, and as a result I think though we make a lot of jokes about them in our culture we're way more sympathetic to them than Japan as a culture would be, and Welcome To The NHK, like many great novels new or old, gives us empathy to a man's story whom we wouldn't normally listen to, but a lot of people did even outside of Japan because as it turns out, like JD Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye which is partly responsible for Welcome To The NHK existing, white people like to contemplate their problems and talk about them because they feel alienated in society, they always have whether it's justified or not, and that's just fascinating that something written by what was essentially a Japanese shut in who became an author, then a manga and anime franchise, blossomed into something so huge that meant so much to this die hard audience, it's the magic of literature that allows itself to coexist in a multimedia environment, it is a story that is not threatened by being constrained to a book or a comic or an anime, it is a story that escaped and could not be contained even in isolationist Japan, but I think the greatest accomplishment of Welcome To The NHK was that it was created by an unemployed bum loser who was tired of being a massive failure, so he turned his failure into a novel about being a failure, which then turned into a huge multimedia franchise. Truly, an inspiration to us all.
Another of my favourite books ever which is like the flipside of the otaku culture Welcome To The NHK comes from, it's much more upbeat and portrays the positive aspects of otaku in Japan rather than the creeper side of it like NHK does.
It's called Train Man or Densha Otoko by Hitori Nakano, it's this romance novel for guys oddly enough that's about this guy who saves a girl on a train from a drunk guy but later he turns to his 2channel forum buddies to help him get the courage to ask out this girl on a date and the plot just blossoms from there. What makes Train Man even better is that it may or may not be a true story. I once watched a video online where some girl was saying that we don't need myths and legends anymore, with this assumption that myths and legends don't happen in modern culture, but Train Man is a prime example of 21st Century folklore from the internet age that I don't think gets enough credit for proving that myth and legend is alive and kicking, I think it's awesome that we live in an era where while it doesn't matter if Train Man was real or a hoax, we have this 21st Century equivalent to Robin Hood of Nottingham or some shit which is another folk hero based on very dubious historical record. Train Man is also the first example of a romance novel for guys that I've ever seen, and it came from a time in Japanese culture where men in Japan were somehow allowed by society to be all romantic to the women they loved rather than like it is in Western culture where hypermasculine whitey culture is all "Being loving and affectionate to your lady is totally gay". Train Man isn't just a romance novel for guys, it broke ground, it challenges what men are willing to read, not to mention how the internet can be incorporated into the 21st Century novel so that it can continue to be a valid art form that young people continue to work in as a medium. Lots of people in say, The Guardian newspaper and other places get all worried about whether literature is dead, or nothing original will ever be committed to the printed page, but I don't think books are dead as an artform at all. Considering the above examples I've listed of my two favourite books, which tell a very similar cultural story from different angles and different ideologies, literature is alive and well but nobody bothered to check the pulse. Literature has barely begun to deal with the kinds of issues young people my age are dealing with. And people say that nothing original will ever be written again - bullshit, you know why there's a sense that nothing original is getting published right, it's not because Fifty Shades Of Grey was a fanfic that became successful, it's because young people haven't been passed the torch to yet and we're still being bombarded with the leftover ideas and cultural memes of the last generation. Ten years from now I guarantee you we'll be seeing a lot less tired Star Trek and Star Wars references in pop culture and we'll be seeing a lot more Jurassic Park, Neon Genesis Evangelion, maybe even a few Dragon Ball Z and Scott Pilgrim Versus The World references here and there, these are things my generation grew up with that were made in our own lifetimes, and they're fresh, new cultural memes that yearn to be run into the ground by young voices yet to be heard.
As for films I like, I'm really struggling to come up with a top ten list of my favourite films ever, since I grew up in a house with a film school grad brother and I watched a lot of films with him. I don't play video games much because I'm terrible at them so in order to reach out to my brother I'd find myself subjecting him to weird movies I'd heard about online and managed to hunt down in some backwater JB Hi-Fi where these kind of oddball films are still in print within my region code. I've made it obvious that TGWTG and other internet reviewers were responsible for encouraging me to try new cinematic delights but I don't think people who know me in real life realise this, there was this one time I was on the bus from a street party in Newtown and my sassy gay friend Terry was astounded as to why I knew about all these awesome films he'd never heard of, I ended up telling him that the reality was I wasn't a cool tastemaker at all, and that I just found out about them from TGWTG and such places, he was kind of shocked because he previously thought I was a cool dude as far as high functioning autistics went, the man clearly doesn't understand that nerds talking about obscure things on the internet is to autistics what reality television is to gay people of his kinda circle. My point being is I ended up revealing the secret to my underground arts success and he was floored that I was a nerd all along. I get mistaken for being a hipster a lot because I go to an art school, but don't be fooled by my awareness of surrealist filmmakers and artists, the nerd roots run deep to the extent that after a long period of horrifying depression I tried going back to my nerd roots and started watching anime and weird movies that appeal to nerds again.
Like I remember I found out about Ralph Bakshi through hearing about this movie called Heavy Traffic, which was about this shut in cartoonist who made art in his basement essentially while living with his mixed race parents in New York City, and he ends up dating this sassy black woman bartender and it's the best film about how racism actually happens in real life rather than stuff like The Help which try to hammer in the racism is bad angle so hard it misses the mark, Heavy Traffic is one of my favourite movies ever though, if you had to pin me down and force me to put at least one movie on my top ten list it would be on there, in the higher rankings too. I discovered round about the same time I was looking for similar subject matter to Welcome To The NHK, I really dig stories about creative shut ins who try to make something of themselves, most movies you see about young people now have slacker characters like a Scott Pilgrim or a Judd Apatow archetype, who people my age are supposed to relate to but I don't think any of the modern slacker characters outside of Satou Tatsuhiro from Welcome To The NHK have come close to remotely being as relatable as Michael from Heavy Traffic, both of them share similar qualities in that they're considered failures by society's weird standards but there's more going on in their heads than people actually see and give them credit for.
I guess you could call Satou and Michael something along the lines of "creeper with a heart of gold", since they're kinda creepers sometimes and they have serious flaws but they have such fascinating inner lives and struggles that you stop caring that they're kinda sexist or racist since right from the get go you understand that the reason they're like that is their environment versus their actual morality most of the time. I really love Michael as a character because he represents a reality of the 70s you don't often see, Hollywood depicts the 70s in most mainstream movies as this safe, watered down counter culture where civil rights and everything happened, but he was a twenty two year old virgin in an era before the internet and back then we didn't have webcomics that Michael probably would have been in the business of if he existed now, or in some kinda remake. I look at Michael and I feel kinda sad for him because it makes me realise how I was born at kind of a perfect time in history where you could reach out to complete strangers on the internet, and you can just outright post your creative work online. I also admire the shit out of him because when I was about twenty two like he is in this movie, I was a virgin (still am) whose only real outlet was his creative work since I didn't get invited to many parties, sure Michael's a cartoonist and I realise to young people that's a way cooler profession than just being a writer who writes novels, short stories and blogs, but I think despite my being jealous of Michael's ability to draw I relate to his ability to resist the dreary awfulness of his lonely urban lifestyle where he has to go to the movies by himself, his only outlet is drawing stuff late at night, he's probably not sleeping too well either, but his passion for his creative work keeps him feeling imaginative and alive and that meant the world to me when I was just starting out in University. So many slacker characters in fiction get depicted as being too lazy or afraid to take a chance and make something of themselves, but not only does Michael know what he wants to do with he's life, he's already doing it, right now, presumably because he knows if he doesn't he won't have anything else to help him bear the burden of his lonely life. He might not be published in the newspaper comic strip yet but right here, right now, he's exactly where he wants, nay, needs to be in his life. He's well on his way to being somebody. And we need more young people characters like that. Because not all of us are listless bums wandering the Earth being shouted at by our parents. Some of us actually like our parents. Because they support us.
I used to listen to nothing but Andrew Lloyd Webber until the internet rescued me from the Phantom's clutches. I still like the Phantom Of The Opera musical, it's just that I'm now aware of music that doesn't come from film soundtracks or musicals now. I listen to a lot of hip hop, pop and some rock and metal in equal measure, I'm very eclectic because as a guy who writes books I'm always looking for the appropriate background music for the right moment and tone. It's funny because since a lot of the pieces of music I allude to in my novels are instrumentals from film scores I may not have to pay royalties to the publishers of the lyrics due to there not being any to reproduce in my prose.
I really like Kanye West and The Beastie Boys in terms of rap, but I'm also the proud owner of Vanilla Ice's To The Extreme album and two NWA CDs of their most influential work, I have Eazy-Duz-It by Eazy-E as well, but before I get rambly about that I want to point out why I find the work of The Beastie Boys so interesting, it's because The Beastie Boys appear to be the definitive example of cross cultural influences that get co-opted by white people right. I've noticed Ralph Bakshi in his animation work has a shitload of African American characters in them, regardless of how integral to the plot they are, well The Beastie Boys succeed because they're also Jewish artists who were influenced by black culture and the music that comes with it, but they did it in a way which wasn't annoying or irritating to actual black people, kind of how many black people adore Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin despite it being made by a white, Jewish guy. The Beastie Boys aren't just important because of their vast body of work, they're also important because they prove that white people actually can be cool, and be inspired by the artforms of other cultures than their own without degrading or debasing those cultures by respecting the material they draw from that. Another band I like is Oingo Boingo, I only have one of their albums, Only A Lad, but I listen to that thing again and again, it's shorter than a lot of albums can get in rap sometimes, very digestible in ways but eerily sinister in others, like there's this song by them you've probably heard in AMVs on Youtube called Little Girls which is about pedophilia. And they close out the album with a song about masturbation. And the sinister subject matter is contrasted with cartoonish pop Caribbean influences and 80s beats. Yeah... I adore this album for being both brazen and quite a work of art in its own right as far as pop music goes.
I also really like animation, both Western and anime if you haven't guessed, but that's for another day.
This is getting a bit long so I'll end it here, part four will wrap this up.
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