Wildest dreams, a psychogeographic review of Giorgio Moroder E=MC2
Just like the future, the night in the city once held the promise of pleasure through excess, only we didn't get the right machines. This is an album that should be listened to between the front seat of a blue Testarossa hover-car and the twenty-first floor of a Disco plastic skyscraper, all at about a flash below light speed and a neuron away from final madness.
I am however listening to it at ear-splitting volume on headphones, slumped on the handle of my bike in the fast lane, going as slow as I can without stopping or falling, drunk out of my eyes, in the cool Kyoto morning,the machine disco of E=MC2 barely covering the frightening cawing of crows murdering the old city.
There was a girl tonight, she was gorgeous, digital, microprocessors in her hair, and things started just fine, incomprehensible words, fast smiles, the works. But then the music in the club was boys only, some sort of breakcore that could have been hair metal for all I heard, and she vanished, which I blame on the catastrophic sounds. And here I am half a dozen hours later, drowning in the five hundred drinks I've inoculated myself with, on a slow bike to China.
Baby blue indeed.
I try to check the time on my cell phone, but my pocket stubbornly refuses to let it out, haven't got X-ray pockets yet, I pull, a MK cab passes dangerously close to me seconds before I crash into a bus stop with a thud. I get up and back on the ride, I grazed my elbow real nice. A dim light, a shadow moves inside the miniature house across the street.
The party tonight could have been amazing, they had everything, state-of-the-art sound system, a V-jay show projected on mirror polygons, hundreds of tiny light cells covering the ceiling, air conditioning, polyester everywhere, pretty high on the future scale, only the patrons were stuck in the fifties, girls on one side pouting on sofas, boys on the other horsing around. What a night indeed.
It's not the old city's fault if its inhabitants let her down on her way to Technopolis, focusing on refrigerators that tell you you're dying and phones that lie to your friends instead of friendly cyborgs and intelligent miniaturizers. And I would have settled for hoverboots and X-Ray specs, If only we weren't afraid.
Funny how people imagine Japan as a futuristic land of tech, when everything here is mostly outdated. Kerosene heaters, cables everywhere, pen and paper, overcrowded narrow streets, dead ends.
But then there's the monorail that takes you to Expo Park,through deserted platforms, lonely halls and underground galleries. The stations are magnificent, neon, plastic and polished concrete architecture, robotic voices narrate the comings and goings of the unmanned electric train through the Osaka suburb. Exit the station though and you're back in the fifties again: beehived housewives with pairs of kids, they drive Huge cars between the fridge and the supermarket while Daddy's working the pen at work, honey I'm home, but home's still there, mainly for the appliances, The fridge is the future room, everything automatic, Daddy still has to jerk off manually though, in the public toilets right outside the monorail.
I stop at a random convenience store for tuna sandwiches and coke, the interior is white and shiny, as close as we ever get to the Nostromo, but hey I'm the alien after all, exploding out of my own stomach as a cop car pulls over outside the store, tiny, letting out a two-man crew of blue androids, cold, eyes on screen, looking for the John Connors of the world, or perhaps the shadow rang them about that drunken alien on the street. Me I'm in love with past ideas of the future, I don't fear machines and mutants, as long as they throw a good party. Tonight could have rocked, something was missing, besides that girl's body in my arms.
I exit the store, the cops want to see my bicycle registration, I hand it to them, but the problem is that I'm too obviously drunk. They double and triple-check everything, this is not the droid you're looking for, careful on your way back to your fridge.
Easier said than done, this is the city of dead-ends, and it's one-way street night, the land is claiming me, trying to find some hole to put me in. I envision a future where you could go everywhere, the landscape an assemblage of shifting volumes, like a rubik's cube of partitions and catwalks, and escalators and elevators, loads of them, fast, safe, greeting you by your first name and taking you wherever to whatever your heart desires, where others want it too.
I can't figure maths, especially not drunk, but I get E=MC2: it's about the equation involving love and fear equals the future.
Plenty of fear in the city night, that we went from Giorgio to Breakcore tells me that, the sky's dark, can't see Space, we forgot about that one too alright, otherwise I'd be going home with a girl from Alpha centauri on my space bike. Instead I park my wheels along the house, close the door on the neighbourhood, in twenty minutes it'll be six and the old folks will sweep the street to death, as they do everyday. The freaks come out in the morning.
