Tokusatsu (特撮) is a Japanese term that applies to any live-action film or television drama that usually features superheroes and makes considerable use of special effects (tokusatsu literally translates as “special filming” in Japanese).

Tokusatsu entertainment often deals with science fiction, fantasy or horror, but movies and television shows in other genres can sometimes count as tokusatsu as well. The most popular types of tokusatsu include kaiju monster movies (the Godzilla and Gamera film series), superhero TV serials (the Kamen Rider and Metal Hero Series), and mecha dramas (Giant Robo). Some tokusatsu television programs combine several of these subgenres (the Ultraman and Super Sentai series). Tokusatsu is one of the most popular forms of Japanese entertainment, but most tokusatsu movies and television programs are not widely known outside Asia.

I like how it means “special filming”: perversely cogent or bewilderingly broad? I’m not sure. This poster from the Wikipedia page, illustrative of the form, is definitely special:

A poster for Godzilla (1954).

Anyway, lets take a little bit of that, throw in some steampunk tropes, and then ask Zack Snyder to wave his magic wand of light and noise. And what do we get? Well, we get Sucker Punch, obviously. Is this what the collision of Western and Japanese pulp cinema looks like? Is Zack Snyder best understood as a cross between Roland Emmerich and Quentin Tarantino? Again, I’m not sure. There is a trailer here and it is lovely, but clearly it is only a trailer: the film might not be nearly that cool. But I really don’t care: just a small dose of the cool seeping through that trailer would be nice. (It also strikes me that Sucker Punch could be viewed as the anti–Inception, as both films seem to touch similar bases, albeit with very different methodologies; put another way, Sucker Punch might turn out to be to Inception what The Evil Dead was to The Shining.)

Here are some (okay, 30 — I couldn’t stop) screenshots from that trailer:

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And the trailer is only about a minute and a half long. The man is clearly a little mad. But he’s a madman with a lots of money (upwards of $85 million for Sucker Punch) to spend on “special filming”, which frankly is awesome (and a little frightening).

This is surely one of the most ambitious lists currently on Wikipedia. Personally, I’d be more interested in seeing a list of all the films that begin with a montage of “real life” footage before segueing into the fictional world of the film. I watched Dark Blue earlier this week, and in that, the director, Ron Shelton, used the footage of Rodney King being assaulted\beaten\subdued by the Los Angeles Police Department to open his thriller about corruption in the LAPD. There must be hundreds more (I’m fairly sure JFK opens with “real” footage, and of course Stone weaves a great deal of archive material into the body of the film).

Another interesting list would be a list of novels directly inspired by actual historical events. I was thinking about this while listening to an audiobook of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid because I found myself trying to figure out who was fictional and who wasn’t. There are thousands of historical novels, of course, but I’m thinking specifically of novels that build themselves around recognisable “events” or “points” in history (The Cold Six Thousand, the sequel to American Tabloid, opens just after news breaks that John F. Kennedy has been assassinated). I can’t find a list that does what I want, though, and I’m not in the frame of mind to make one. But books and films that use historical events (or narratives) as texture, or as structuring elements, are on my mind.

Over the last few weeks I’ve mean mulling a little excessively on the question of verismilitude and art, and I need to mull some more, form up some thoughts.

I have mulled some more, but not enough. Will return to this in the future.

For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a one time pad is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

The voices are of varying pitches and intonation; there is even a German station (The Swedish Rhapsody) that transmits a female child’s voice!

One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official end of the cold war, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Tantalising oddness. Wikipedia has more information, here. One “mysterious, powerful shortwave numbers station” was nicknamed “The Lincolnshire Poacher”, apparently. And more information on the influence of The Conet Project, here; and an article from The Washington Post; and another article on the subject from Salon.

Which is what is now happening. It is April, after all (I’ve never really felt it was the cruelest month).

In the end it was taken away from me.  Hugo concocted some story about wanting to use it for a “project”, and so I quietly handed it over, not wanting to cause an incident.  I knew he was doing it for the right reasons, but it hurt.  Withdrawal was tough, but I got through it with the help of the OM-2n, some cheap Chinese brandy, and a lot of scanning.  And I came to see I was better off without it: the rate at which I was going through film was completely unsustainable, and I don’t honestly think the speed and ease of use was helping me to take interesting photographs: I wasn’t thinking carefully or creatively enough when making exposures, I was just making them, moving, and then making some more.

But I did take a few good photographs with it, I think.  One roll I developed today, a roll I put through the camera specifically to experiment with the flash unit, has a nice selection of fast-paced, loosely-composed snapshots.  I took them when Hugo and I (but not Liu Bing, strangely — she adores barbecue, but perhaps had gone back to Xi’an) were out eating and wandering one night.  Below are twelve of those photographs.  If for some wildly inexplicable reason you’d like a print of one, let me know.

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Lover Mine was originally the name of a small edit of photographs of Liu Bing, my other half, that I put together while in Zhuhai, a city in Guangdong.  It was a very personal set of photographs, but a set that I liked and wanted to work on further; the problem, however, was knowing what to do with it.

And then today I had an idea: use erhebung as a platform for ongoing series — chains, arrays, lines — of connected posts, each series based around a theme, each post within a given series containing a single photograph (or possibly more than one) that fits that theme.  An essay wouldn’t be revealed all in one go, but would emerge gradually, episodically, over time: a temporal progression of images evolving and adapting with both creator and consumer, the journey as crucial as the destination.  Seeing the whole, the idea of the finished work, gradually accrete would become as important as, if not more important than, the whole itself.

I like narrative.  I like to read, I like to watch films, I like to construct diaries of my life, and I like to see the diaries of others.  I am fascinated by our experience of the flow of time and by our attempts to record that experience in art.  I am deeply invested, personally, in finding newer and truer ways to present my experiences and my art.  And when I say “invested” what I mean is: I think about it a lot, and not doing anything with all that thinking would surely be a waste of brain-energy.  And this is what I have been thinking about today.

To come back to the idea of chains, arrays and lines, of many thematically connected series, the plan is to present work, whether it be prose or photography or finger-painting, not as a fixed, finished, complete entity, but as an ongoing stream (photostreams on Flickr are, to a certain extent, never-ending, circular constructions: the end, the most recent work, is at the top, viewed first; the start, the oldest work, is at the end, viewed, ninety-nine times out of a hundred last — this is unusual, and very different to the “traditional” method of presenting photography online), each entry in a series part of definite narrative, but the series itself open-ended (within reason, and as far as it is possible to generate new work), the work continuing until it naturally stops, or until it returns to its beginning, the circle closing.

I’m not doing this, talking about this, simply for the sake of it: I genuinely have difficulty knowing when something I’m making is finished, and in the past I have too often found myself prematurely terminating a creative process solely because I felt I had some obligation to produce a complete thing (it goes back to when we were at school, perhaps, teachers in all subjects requiring finished items, rarely interested in something that was gestating or growing over time).  And there is no such obligation, or no need for such an obligation, on the infinite landscape of the internet.  The internet, this blank canvas without edges, provides the artist with the ability to present his art however he chooses; all the artist need do is imagine (preferably imagine wildly).

But most methods of presenting art online are far less imaginative than the art itself, and a large part of the problem is pace, tension, time.  When designing online galleries people think about space — pixels and browser dimensions and leading edges and margins — but rarely about time.  And time is important.  When people read books there is an element of time built in to everything: the time to pick up the object itself, the time to open it, the time to turn the page.  And time is frequently taken into consideration by the author: long sentences slow the reader down, shorter sentences get the reader reading more quickly.  Designers, too, will typeset different novels differently, some novels given lots of white space, space in which the reader can muse and mull, some novels given far less, the reader driven to dash through, ignoring possible deficiencies of prose so they can jump from one key plot-point to another.  Paintings also factor in time, those on larger canvases requiring the viewer to look for longer, the eye, unable to take everything in at once, forced to wander from character to character, from brightly-lit focal point to more dimly-lit side-show: the more opaque the object, the longer the time needed to see it, the greater the feeling on finally experiencing the reveal.  Time, put simply, creates texture and rhythm, pacing and tension. But on the internet there is very little pacing, even less tension (unless you count the tension of waiting for a page to finish loading).  Flash galleries are ram-raided in brief moments of quiet at work, photographic essays are skimmed through with an idle finger on a too-quick mouse, the last few photographs rarely receiving as much attention as the first few.  We can do better, surely?

In place of HTML galleries that go from beginning to end or flash galleries that have play and pause buttons and progress counters (I dislike progress counters, particularly with films:  I don’t want to know how much time is left, as knowing how much time is left utterly changes the experience), why don’t we try other things?  Galleries that begin at a fixed point but give different options for where to go next, different options for what photograph you see, which chapter you read (imagine a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure version of The Americans where after each photograph you could select what you saw next: “Click here for more on servitude, here for more on the suburban life, or here for more compositions featuring out-of-focus subjects”), or galleries that unfold completely randomly (Koudelka meets the iPod Shuffle, each viewing completely different to the last, each unplanned but fortuitous juxtaposition a source of delight; flick your wrist and hope that this time you get the dog in the snow), or galleries that are released gradually, photograph by photograph, over a period of days or weeks or months or years (the original black and white version of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta was released chapter by chapter over a three year period, forcing a pace of consumption that must have created almost unendurable tension).  All these things could be done, or could inspire other even wilder things to be tried.

I’d almost forgotten where this began, but then I remembered: Lover Mine; presentation of my work; seeking something new, something closer to the truth of my experience.  I’m fed up with rules, tired of the tired-old, same-old-same-old ways of presenting things online.  I want to present things, and want other people to present things, in a way that goes beyond putting up the page and saying: “Hey, here are twelve jpeg files arranged on a grid; take a look and try not to flick through them in less time than it took the page to load.”  There must be other better ways.  All of this is really about pace, about slowing down the speed of consumption to begin to better match the speed of production.  When people used to read the periodical installments a Charles Dickens’ novel there must have been a strong sense of the man behind the words, the craftsman steadily grafting a story.  Or there is meta-time: the online release of Dracula that posts new installments from the epistolary horror novel to a schedule delineated by the novel’s internal time, Mina Murray’s journal entry of August 14th published online on the 14th of August.  Endless possibilities.

Coming back to my work, Lover Mine will hopefully become the first episodic series (chain, array, line — call it what you will) of photographs, a new post appearing on erhebung on a regular basis (weekly, maybe, or twice-weekly), each post containing a photograph and perhaps some text, each post building towards a greater whole, but the process, the journey towards that whole, in no way marginalised.  Another series will probably focus on my photographs “of China”, a series that may or may not appropriate the title My Country, My People.  If it does appropriate that name it will appropriate it in the full knowledge that the new MCMP will be very different from the old, the new accepting that the project can’t possibly be finished when the reality, the experience, is still being lived.  An episodic My Country, My People would wander anywhere, curling in on itself, crossing over places its been before; it would be, to borrow a quotation Hugo showed me, the “train that never [stops] traveling”.  Yet another thread might be called something along the lines of One-shots or Singles, photographs that exist purely in and of themselves, photographs (or pieces of prose, or finger-paintings) that do not seek to be collectivised.  And there will no doubt be other things, probably, as it isn’t as though I’ve planned any of this coherently.

Why, some may ask, not just use Flickr, a service that is all about flow and endlessness?  Flickr, for me, is the light box where you place things and squint at them, the table in the pub where you argue a point over pints, the round-table discussion where you come up with a strategy for taking over the world; Flickr, for me, is the wall at which I can throw anything, the good sticking, the bad falling to the wayside.  This place, erhebung, is more like a fanzine handed out at college, or a photocopied A5 pamphlet sent out in the mail, or a stencilled protest poster plastered to a lamp-post.  The one thing has to happen before the other, and neither really makes much sense without the other.  That at least is what makes sense right now, as I write this, late at night, a coffee on one side of me, a whiskey on the other; I fully accept that it may make no sense whatsoever.

And here seems like a good place to stop.

There is an urge within me, and I’m not sure where it came from; but I do feel compelled, very frequently, to pack up and relocate, making a nest somewhere I’ve not been before, starting again the process (the very rewarding process) of discovering things anew that inevitably initiates when we find ourselves in new places.  I find this periodic moving essential, and become edgy, uncomfortable, when I feel roots are setting too deeply in a single apartment or room or hostel.  Sharks swim to keep themselves alive, swimming not to predate, but to ensure that they are able to continue swimming, the next day, and the next, and every day after; moving so that they may exist.

It is doubtful that sharks or other animals enjoy it in and of itself — they do it because it is what they know they need to do; but I wonder if animals like sharks, so much in flux, are comfortable with the topography of their lives, with the rhythms of the todays and the uncertainties of the tomorrows.  I would like to ask one, one day.

I don’t like the practical end of moving — scanners and books and cameras are heavy; rolls of films don’t like x-rays; clutter, by definition, is hard to pack — and the thought of it is often enough to stop me thinking about actually acting on any particular urge to move I have; but the urge usually remains, and I do frequently find myself going between places (most recently from Xi’an to Hanzhong) with bags and boxes containing “my life” in tow, and when that happens I inevitably end up contemplating the whole strange process, as I am now, writing this.

So, see you around, R3M — sad to lose you, and hoping you will soon be in the hands of a deserving (and loving) photographer.

When I hit Shanghai I made a few choices, picked up a lot of black and white film, and set off back to Xi’an charged with purpose — dig into the undeveloped bag of film and start pulling out shots.  And out of that came Territory (not landscapes, but landscapes overlaid with boundaries and borders; and not the boundaries and borders of politics and history, civilisation and development, but the boundaries and borders, fragile and inchoate, of human necessities and desires, ideas and dreams), a first gasp of air taken by photographs that had been holding their breath for seven months.  It is just a word, or an idea squeezed into a word, and it may not last; but I am interested to see what more will come as I gradually work through the backlog.  Additionally, there will be newer work, shot as I am processing the older work, and the two may well interact.  Daunting though it may sound, I am looking forward to steadily scanning through the seven months that saw me in Xinjiang, Lanzhou, Hanzhong, Yinchuan, and also, in the weeks following the earthquake, in Xi’an.

And as I write this I am in Xi’an.  I had to come back again for a little health check (a check related to my work visa — nothing worrying), but the biggest motivation for returning, for me, was to finally relocate the bulk of my things to Hanzhong — this may be the last time for quite some time that I am a resident in Xi’an (I’m sure I’ll make occasional appearances here as a visitor).  And there was a further incentive to come: in Xi’an there is a very good lab, and so while here I have had processed all of the colour film I’ve exposed since January, both slide and print (remarkably, it only took 400 pieces of Chinese money and a couple of hours waiting).  The sight of all those photographs — some forgotten, some not — stacked up in plastic sleeves was a little strange: I had become very comfortable with the notion that they were neatly wound up in their scratched and crudely annotated cannisters, unseen;  after they had been released back into the light of day (from light to dark and back to light — simple and pleasantly symmetrical) it struck me that they had suddenly become far more demanding entities.  They require attention.  (They’re calling now, from the bag, but I’m trying to ignore them — no scanner, here, so nothing I can do for them but stare and tease with the possibility of release.)

[Update: a new post on related matters can be found here.]

I’ve always used my iPod as an external HDD, carting photos around on it, and installers.  Recently I purchased an 8GB flash drive to run portable apps (I was getting fed up of having to install things every time I went to the net bar), and when I picked up the 6120c I decided to get two 2GB MicroSD cards to use in it.  And before all of these there was the trusty 80GB Fujitsu drive, once inside my old Dell laptop, now in a portable HDD casing.

So, yes, I gave them names.  Names taken from the Greek Alphabet, to be precise.  I decided on IOTA, for the iPod, as it starts with an “I”.  The old 80GB I named OMEGA, primarily because it sounded right, but in part because Omega was a Time Lord in the original Doctor Who.  The 8GB flash drive, the drive that I’m running Firefox off of right now, became NU, for no real reason other than that I liked the way the Greek character looked.  The two 2GB MicroSD cards are ALPHA and BETA — I wanted something simple as I use them quite a lot.

As it turns out I use BETA more than I use ALPHA.  BETA has become home to all of my software — all the things I use when I want to scan the internet, write, chat with the other half, or download and listen to podcasts.  The purpose of ALPHA materialised yesterday, or maybe the day before, when I discovered, finally, a Last.fm client that would work on the Symbian operating system.   Once I saw that this worked I could see what ALPHA would do — it would store a selection of music scraped off of the now slightly-unmanageable library residing in my iPod.  This function of this selection would be to allow me to listen to more of the music I sometimes miss, and also to listen to newer tracks as soon as they’ve been downloaded.  And with playlists again building up on Last.fm, I would be able, again, after a long hiatus, be able to use the vast and gestating database brain of Last.fm to feed me recommendations.

Today I will attempt a second “Transfer to Alpha”.  The first was semi-successful (you can see a bit of what I heard here), but I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll be able to consume a good selection of music — some previously heard, some not — and feed that information back to the number-crunching Last.fm beast.  And then the beast can give me some sweets, maybe.

But I had just come out the other side of a somewhat hectic morning, so I can see how it happened.  First, I get a call from one of our teachers (the teacher who on Sunday night went to Chengdu for a little rest and recreation…) wherein she explains how last night she bought a ticket to come back to Hanzhong but found, on arriving at Chengdu station, that all the trains had been cancelled, and then how this morning she went to buy a bus ticket, only to be given another ticket for a train.  That in and of itself didn’t involve too much hassle: I called a few people I knew in Chengdu, and in Xi’an, got some information, and sorted it out.

It was the second event that threw me.  And I’m still thrown.

While talking to my regional manager about the situation with our teacher my regional manager mentions to me that he’d been meaning to call me that day anyway as he had some worrying news about visas.  Now, the visa situation over the last few weeks has been a little confusing, with different people saying different things and nothing really very clear.  However, all interested parties were under the impression that work visas, if processed correctly, were not a problem.  But with the general atmosphere, his mention of visas, and his tone, immediately had bells tinkling.  And not without cause: it seems that the Chinese embassy in Hong Kong has decided only to process Chinese visas for those either working or living in Hong Kong; anyone else interested in getting hold of a visa for China needs to apply through the embassy in their home country.

London is very far away. Getting to London is very expensive.  I don’t really want to go to London or pay the money required to be able to go to London.

I’m currently in a daze.  There is no doubt that I will get the visa.  That isn’t really in question: I live here, my life is here, there would be enormous upheaval involved in my leaving for anything more than a short time.  But it may mean I have to pay 9,000–10,000 RMB, or two months salary, to get back to the UK and have the proper paperwork processed. 9,000–10,000 RMB, on a plane ticket, to get some paperwork.  I’m not livid.  I don’t seem to have energy to be livid.  I’m just, as I say, in a daze.