Robot Love Revisited

So, not *that* long ago I wrote something about the possibilities (and problems) of having a robot boyfriend (check the archive if you're interested). Anyway, it seems that the Japanese are swiftly working on making this a reality. Check out this interesting article about cuddly robots in Japan taken from my new favourite online source Intelligent Life. Astroboy, Ifbots, Daleks... all the very best in robotica...

Indiana Jones was a Gay Kraut

So says the Daily Sport - my latest discovery (file under: more reasons to love the UK for all the wrong reasons).

The Sport is an enigma in newspaper circles, the website offers nothing in the way of content except perhaps for this oblique manifesto. Believe me, the site does not do justice to the real thing - a newspaper which has boldly decided to excise all the bits that make newspapers boring (and we're talking TABLOID newspapers here, so you know, you connect the dots...) and just focus on the good stuff: the stories about people doing stupid things, freaky things, dirty things, sport, and page three girls. So visionary is the Daily Sport that they've decided to run a page three girl on EVERY page. The Daily Sport could be retitled "Tits, Tits, Topless Talent, Tennis Players' Arses, Football Coverage: back page." Laaahhhvvv it!

Halfway there...

Hello folks...
Roving reporter mode is switched on and the tray table is in the upright position. Not much time for reflections on Korea, except to say it really is the land of morning calm and the ladies do their workouts in public parks complete with open access gym equipment. Would take photos but that seems akin to the peverts on the beach going crazy with their camera phones. My pics will come later. For now, let me just say that the Korean airline hostess uniforms (and hey, there ain't no guys here, it's strictly "girls only" type work) are without question the best I've ever seen. If you don't believe me, just check out this YouTube vid I found to prove the point. Keep in mind though, I didn't see one single African-American Korean hostess on my flight. They must pull those out for the glamour flights and Victoria's Secret tv specials...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEvR_DSW4MA
Anyong Haseyo!

How Swede it is...

Fickle, fickle me. Apologies to the inhabitants of the supermagicdiscoveryworld. No excuses - just lame mumblings about being, y'know, out of touch and feeling a bit sheepish. That and a cup of joe collided with my laptop one morn while on my way out the door to Italian classes. Rest assured however, it's just about five weeks til I depart for my own supermagic discovery of Italy, London, various bits of France, Germany and Korea so there'll be plenty of discovering to be done.

So, the latest addition to the supermagicdiscoveries is this: there's nothing like a Swede to make you feel good. And I'm not talking tubers here. Athough tubas might be closer to the mark. Jens Lekman. Lovely Jens. Even the Swedish boy frantically describing all the cultural references about Sweden in the songs and then randomly groping his girlfriend couldn't put me off. It's interesting when you go to these gigs and see the kind of fans you never knew existed. Like the impecably dressed almost forty somethings that looked like the kind of indie-grownups I want to age into being. Like the rotund man with one leg six inches shorter than the other. The beardy, hoodie wearing bloke who drank beer and munched on potato chips secreted in the pouch of aforementioned hoodie. And of course all the usual indie hipsters who bounced up and down placidly and cheered (in Swedish) for Jens to come on for his encore.
If Morrissey is a product of Manchester's gloom then Jens' take on life in the quiet suburbs of Sweden is an altogether lighter sweeter affair - despite the fact he's still doing the same take on the whole "get me outta here" teenage longing. Moz is all "every day is like Sunday," tea and toast, sexual longing. Jens is all about Friday night bingo, local hicks and google maps. You know you're listening to someone special when they tell you that they "wrote this song when I was 18" and then play a little homage to Moz like "Black Cab" which doesn't even sound like a bad Smiths parody but an actual song. (And even better, Jens actually seems like a nice child prodigy - not some straggly looking Bright Eyes-esque hipster. One thing I reckon you could bet your bingo winnings on is that Jens is not cherry picking groupies to fuck after the show like ole BrightEyes. And, hey, even if he is, he's the kind've guy who's going to go round bragging about it afterwards - those Swedes have decorum).

That thing about the black cabs though is a pickle... In England, at least, it's the mini cabs you've got to stay clear of - black cabs are a luxury for the rich, the hurried, the single female traveller and, in my experience at least, the drunken who need to be sure they can make it home in one piece.

Jens makes me happy. He makes me happier when I see him in person and feel the need to bop around like I did when I was 17. He also makes me want to run away from this town and find somewhere else to live. Maybe Sweden?

Are we tough enough?

Oh boy! I've been bad, huh? Blogging should be all about sharing the love right? So don't give me no guilt trip because I've been a teensy bit distracted of late. I'm back on board. I swear... If you don't watch out I'll starting posting film reviews up here and it will all turn dark.

In actual fact, all this time while I haven't been blogging I've been making supermagicdiscoveries left, right and centre. Some great music has been heard, some graphic novels have been read, some strange candy has been consumed.

But none of that today, my dears. Nosiree! Today it's the delightfully wrong rumour that New Kids on the Block are getting back together. In the words of Michael Cera's character in Juno: "Wizard!"

Can you believe your ears (will you believe your eyes when you finally see them, there, on that stage, looking the way aging boy bands will inevitably look - i.e. strung out, pumped up, scared shitless)? I hope they're going to wear the same gear. I'm totally digging this late 80s look with all the hair mousse and the vests and the t-shirts with the social messages... Like, seriously, why don't boys have hair like this anymore? If nothing else I hope the reunion tour reinspires a generation of boys to use mousse...

SO the album might tell us "this one's for the children" but I suspect the new tour ought to inolve an album entitled, This One's for my Kid's College Fund, or This One's For My Gambling Debts, or maybe just something simple like, This One's For My Ego.

Jon, Jordan, Joey, Donny and the other dude (ok, ok, Danny). (And now that I've written that I realise that we could well have known them as "3 Js and an awesome set of double Ds" - which has a great ring to it.) If they do come back what the hell are they going to do? Sing "Hangin' Tough" in stadiums around the globe? At shopping malls? Will they pull groupies? The answer to all is "probably" - and yet, here's whats still wrong after all these years - with the exception of pre-pubescent Joey, those boys are WAY TOO OLD. Has anyone seen Donnie Warhlberg lately? NEW KIDS on the block? The name is going to have to change - Old Men on the Block, anyone? Not quite the same ring, huh? Maybe gives out the wrong idea?

When I was a kid Donnie was my favourite. Now I'm worried. What does this say about me that I liked this man? (And keep in mind, he looked like this *at the time*) He's some kinda proto Kid Rock, right? Like, eww.

I bet he calls himself "Don" now and given his predeliction for ugly headwear and stubble I wouldn't be suprised if he likes his friends to refer to him as "The Don" or maybe even (shudder) "The Donster". I bet he bench-presses in his garage and is into quasi-buddist martial arts. I just *know* he has hair plugs. I grieve! I grieve for the lame-ass me who thought he was dreamy... I think I need to go to this (rumoured) concert just to purge myself of the sickness that is teeny-bopper fandom. If they *do* tour I hope to be able to at least pitch a "cultural commentary" article to some loathesome publication in order to claim the cost of my ticket back on tax...

And, I wonder what the chances are of Bros reuniting?

BritMop

It's going to get a bit tired isn't it? If I just keep posting stuff about Salon? Yeah. It's testament to the fact that: 1) my time is limited 2) I find something, I stick to it.
Anyway - today's offering is about my favourite dirty secret: Britpop.
Was having a conversation about this just the other day - Well, in fact to kind of elide the embaressing "I was a teenage Britpopper" disclosure I was trying to talk around the issue and obliquely make comments about being an "Anglophile," mirthfullly describing the lost youth of affected behavior and the painstakingly coiffed black mod bob.
So, Simon Reynolds asks - what ever happened to Britpop? And, forgive me here young naifs, but is that a question really worth asking? The one I tend to ask myself more often is: what was I thinking? For that matter, what was everyone else thinking? How did the whole movement last so long? Can we blame Tony Blair for this? (He who invited Noel and Liam Gallagher to Downing St.) What Reynolds' article makes clear is that - social/cultural issues aside - much of the music was crap. Or at least, far from enduring. This is something I've come to realise myself as I've aged. Things that seemed so full of "something" actually turned out to be pretty empty. Or else, the derivative elements became so overwhelming that instead of sounding like a real song it starts to sound like a thin parody. Indeed, some of the parody music that is around today is ten times stronger than some of the hopeless thin Britpop stuff. Many is the time I've been confronted with my CD collection and been tempted, seriously tempted, to excise some of this embarressing excess to the second hand store - I never do of course...
Britpop was, in almost all respects, one big exercise in embarressment. Reynolds points out how *white* it was. How staunchly safe and unexperimental. All that time I thought myself on the cutting edge for idolising some waifish creature who did a passable impression of what Ziggy Stardust might have been had he touched down in the mid 90s in London behind the local Tescos...
It's terrible to think that for some the very definition of Britpop is Oasis. And I'd hate (and would've hated) to have been tarred with that particular brush. But even then, it's not much of a defense is it? To place yourself squarely on the side of a slightly better class of parody music lout is not really to raise oneself out of the pit. Now days I might be more inclined to align myself to some of the more "enduring" artists - Moz in particular - but it still throws my character into a questionable light...
The Reynolds article is about a CD box set incidentally. Four discs. At first I scoffed at the thought of buying it, but perhaps I could prune that CD collection of mine and just reduce it to the four discs. Hmm, nah.

My Robotic Romance

So, this has brought me out of my blog slump.
[http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2007/11/29/robot_love/index.html]

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me even a little bit that I love robots. Like rilly, rilly, love robots. Hence: the Robbie the robot figurine on my window sill, the inexplicable sympathy for the Daleks, the early morning wishing for a coffee/cleaning robot in the manner of the Jetsons' Rosie, the childhood dream to be turned into a kid-robot in the style of the red dressed, white aproned "Small Wonder" (am I the only one who remembers that show?). And of course the "choice" Conchords song set in "the distant future: the year 2000." Good news for the dorky single girl then to learn that robot boyfriends may well be the way of the future. Very good news indeed...

To give you the lowdown:
One hardcore nerd called David Levy has just written a book about "Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships." What a title huh? I love that use of "evolution" - genius! The main gist of the argument seems to be "love is a powerful force, wouldn't offering humans opportunities for unfettered, uncomplicated love make the world a better place." For a guy who's working on computer technologies for his PhD this is a pretty simplistic reduction of the issues. Luckily, Salon's Machinist asks some better questions, like:

"is getting a robot built to order like ordering up a hooker to your hotel room?"
- perhaps, though the "refund if not satisfied" policy is certainly easier to administer with the robot.

"is a perfect love really love at all, even if it feels like it? Isn't love, like all life, by definition complicated; if you're loving a robot, are you really loving -- are you really living? -- or is the whole thing a simulation, like a very real video game?"
- Well, maybe, but if you extrapolate this idea far enough you could argue that life itself is just a very real video game (RIP Baudrillard, you crazy mother-ucker). If love, or any human experience for that matter, needs to be “real” (ie. Involving other humans) where does that leave the countless things we do that don’t involve other humans? Time on Facebook – not real; time watching the Sopranos/the Conchords/the Boosh – not real. Time reading enormous fabulist book about history of modernity – NOT REAL. The large part of my life is spent in the not real. And the part that is real is usual populated with the most frustrating individuals known to man, woman or bot.
Another thing, what if you fell in love with someone but didn’t spend anytime with their real body? What if you loved them via one remove of reality? What if your love was mediated in some way – like say for instance the way I love Brendan Fraser, locked in time just like he was in Encino Man. How is my loving Brendan Fraser circa 1993 any different from my loving a robot-o-boy?
And on that point about the video game simulation–if you're "just practicing" with the robot-beau then are you also “just practicing” when you treat someone in a less that wonderfully-human-being-ish way (i.e. a one night stand, a booty call, etc.).

Now having backed myself into this particular postmodern corner I’m thinking about the flip side. One thing not mentioned here is the question of embodiment. More than some half-baked idea about “real love” (i.e. fights, bad sex, imperfections, annoying habits) versus simulated perfect robot love (i.e. order up your ideal mate and wait for delivery) is the real sticking point: hard bodies; or soft bodies; or whatever. Bodies count. Salon’s Machinist asks: “Doesn't mortality deepen love -- isn't the preciousness of your love, its susceptibility to diseases and deprivation, part of what makes the feeling so wonderful? Could you love a thing that didn't die?”
The answer to that last question is certainly yes. Plenty of things. But that’s not my point here. More than plain old mortality, the thing that puts the kick in love has got to be the body. Bodies are, after all, the one site of distinction between “friendship” love and “ba-da-bing” love. When bodies get involved things get complicated. Human bodies are like litmus paper, they put emotions to the test; they’re surefire indicators of attraction, repulsion, pleasure, pain. If a robot boyfriend turns up on my doorstep, sure, I know he’s been programmed to love just the stuff I love, but then, who hasn’t? Most of the time, if you’re fishing in the right pond, culture has done all that programming for you, right? So the bigger question is, how would you deal with the notion that your Robo-hunk had no innate hardwiring connecting his emotional CPU with his chiselled Robo-hunk exterior? So, yeah, I still working on that... But there is one thing I’m excited about – we’d both love Kraftwerk, that’s for sure.