"Living Corpse Seeks Grand Affair" — The Animated Story of a Numb Nightmare

“Broken soul meets broken heart for drinks and love on a waterbed of tears”

Tatsumi Film, by Eric Khoo, 2011

I am not a Japanese Animation buff. Yet, it was one of the blessings of my life to discover the genre, more or less by chance, while I was working for the Montreal Festival of Nouveau Cinéma during my twenties.

The magic of animation struck me as being simply limitless, inviting fantasy and surrealism, as well as straight storytelling, made of sober images drenched in humanity.

In my top 10 most loved films of all time is the desperately sad Anime, Grave of the Fireflies by Hotary No-Haka, about a brother and sister whose lives are torn apart by WWII. I watched it in the early noughties on my flatmate’s tiny CRT television. The image of the sky painted red with war was so powerful that I could have been watching it on just about anything and still cried my eyes out. 

Years later, I attended the annual Japanese cinema programme at the ICA in London. I sat mesmerised by the animated film “Tatsumi A Drifting Life”, by Singaporean film director Eric Khoo, and based on the Manga autobiography of Japanese comics artist Yoshiro Tatsumi.

Tatsumi’s five short stories were narrated with such poetry that I was moved to scribble blindly, in the pitch dark of the theatre, the notes that would later turn into a song called “Grand Affair”.

I was watching “Just A Man”, the story of a middle-aged office worker stuck in a useless job in a grey city, living the invisible life of a forgotten soul. The man witnesses, in quiet desperation, the numb nightmare of his life. 

On the verge of retirement, he becomes infatuated with a young, unattainable colleague of his. The man is stirred back to life and has an epiphany: he decides that, instead of letting his adulterous wife spend his pension, he will blow it all on a grand affair.

He makes his way to a brothel, where the prostitute he hires, is a teen who cries and eats all night, instead of having sex with him. 

The next day, back at his desk, he miraculously connects with his beautiful young colleague, who has just had her heart broken. Her boyfriend is the company boss’s son; he won’t marry her because he’s been promised to another.

The man takes his angel out to dinner. All evening, they share their hearts with each other, and end up naked in a hotel room. Although full of fire and desire, the man fails to make love to the woman of his dreams, and the story reaches its pathetic conclusion.

…

I retell Tatsumi’s story of “Just a Man” in the song “Grand Affair”, a piece I’ve pulled out of my music production student archives (the male voice is mine, pitched down).

Nat Ya · Grand Affair - San Francisco, 2014

Grand Affair

Your colleagues despise you

You can’t trust your wife

She’s sleeping with your daughter’s man

You don’t even care

Living corpse seeks grand affair

You don’t even care

Living corpse seeks grand affair

Spinning legs and dancing tits

That hooker’s way too young

She won’t put out, you dry her tears

One more song unsung

Living corpse seeks grand affair

You don’t even care

Living corpse seeks grand affair

Until that angel from above

That goddess passed your desk

With only tender words she spoke

She brought you back from death

And you know she’s not for you

She’s lost her lover

And you know she’s not for you

Broken soul meets broken heart

For drinks

And love on a waterbed of tears

Love on a waterbed of tears

Heartbreak and Marijuana: I Became a Stoner in San Francisco

The worst year of my life was a Cloud of Smoke

I arrived in San Francisco with the love of my life, ready to start our next perfect chapter together.

We had met 4 months before, at 2am on a Monday, in a dodgy South London club. It was intense; it was the great beyond.

I’d never done that well with drugs, but he was into them. He was a highly functional substance-abuser who’d gotten a full scholarship at Berkeley in structural engineering, stoned. He could do high-level computer modelling while completely high on weed. He would channel his intelligence in an almost supernatural way, big black eyes beaming like headlights onto the screen of his laptop.

He was like the moon to me; but younger. 8 years younger. His parents did not approve. Family visits in Tokyo and Hawaii on our way to SF, spelled the end of our love story. When we landed, it was over.

Deep down we both knew it, but for a year, we ran on fumes — literally.

Now that he was back in the land of legalised marijuana, there wouldn’t be a day without smoking. Getting stoned was like a lifeline for him. He put more time and thought into buying weed than a birthday present for me.

Cloud of Smoke (Photo Marija Sribna, 2015)

I got into it, too. He would go to work in the morning and I would light up. I’d make music and watch trashy TV, go to classes, etc

In San Francisco, so many people smoke weed that it has become a normalised part of the culture (arguably, a culture that dates back to the 60s). I don’t think legalised marijuana is a good idea. What I saw were a lot of sedated people, stuck in Stonesville.

Without the smoking, I wouldn’t have been able to bear the day-to-day pain of my heartbreak; with more clarity, I think I would have gotten out sooner.

In the midst of it, I wrote a song called Cloud of Smoke, a trippy electronic jazz lament produced together with my friend Aryaman Agarwal.

Nat Ya · Yark & Nat Ya - Cloud Of Smoke - San Francisco, 2014

Cloud of Smoke

When the air is clear

I find it hard to breathe

I’d like to disappear

And in this cloud of smoke

I see you better, I see it all

In this cloud of smoke

I feel it all, everywhere

There’s still parts of me

That won’t show

That won’t go

Cloud of smoke

I feel better

I see it all

And in this cloud of smoke

I feel better

Cloud of smoke

I feel it all

I see you better

We said our goodbyes and I got on a plane back to London. As soon as I touched down, I could breathe again. Weed no longer needed.

A couple of years later, he moved to Amsterdam.

“Shut Up and Strut It” — Money Is the New Morality

A look at Generation Wealth, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary about addiction and consumerism

“Father of Public Relations” Edward Bernays got women to smoke cigarettes back when it was considered unladylike. The cigarette was a phallic symbol, and the PR stint was genius: suffragettes were given some cigs to light up on their march to convey women’s empowerment. The papers photographed them and published the images — boom, happy tobacco companies.

Since then, marketing, advertising and PR has latched onto a very simple Freudian recipe: sprinkle some libidinal stimulation on anything, and you will get a piping hot consumer.

Ultimately, the power of the commodity as fetish — both as an object of sexualised desire and as an object of worship — is rooted in our sense of lack; we feel that things can give us power and/or value.

The selling strategy has been immensely effective, and a century later, images of extreme wealth and celebrity lifestyles pervade every corner of our media, having stoked a collective obsession with money so acute that we are at “the point of actual and moral bankruptcy.”

So go the words of photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who began taking photographs as a teenager while attending the expensive and exclusive Los Angeles high school of Crossroads in the early 1990s. It was there that she became familiar with the lifestyles of the children of the rich and famous — among them a 12-year-old Kim Kardashian, captured by Greenfield in one of her earliest photographic projects. Twenty-five years, and thousands upon thousands of photographs and interviews later, Greenfield released her documentary masterwork Generation Wealth.

Kim Kardashian, Crossroads High School. Photograph: Laura Greenfield/INSTITUTE

Bus drivers, porn stars and billionaires are the sympathetic figures we get to know through Greenfield’s gentle lens. She weaves anthropology and narrative into an honest, complex exposé of wealthy capitalist societies’ addiction to consumerism. Nobody is immune to this affliction; her canvas stretches to include people from all walks of life — not only those who can afford a life of luxury, but also those who cannot — and that is the point.

In an interview about her film, Greenfield speaks of the huge wealth divide in America: concentration of wealth is at its highest while social mobility is at its lowest. Yet the pervasiveness of media images of luxury and wealth “make people feel like it is normal and that they should have it too.” All the while, there is no relation between what people can afford and what they want.

Greenfield’s trajectory follows the progression of Kardashian-style celebrity culture, where people are adored for the sake of being rich and glamourous. In KK’s case, a sex tape catapults her into fame. The “pornification of culture” finds women especially, looking to sex as a way to bolster their currency; a pervasive phenomenon that manifests in the precocious sexualisation of girls — as seen in toddler beauty pageants.

Then you have the small town girl whose ticket to porn star success is that she has a body that looks prepubescent; she also broke a world-record for the number of men that ejaculated on her in one sitting. She feels positive about the lucrative career she managed to build for herself, and how she made her way out of Nowhereville.

Pageant girl. Photograph: Laura Greenfield/INSTITUTE

The porn star’s ‘better life’ collapses eventually; she is like a player that gets chewed up and spit out by a gambling house — it’s hard to contend that this is a game she could ever have won. Even though her example illustrates an extreme case scenario, the addictive pull of greed at all costs grabs us all to a certain extent. Collectively, we are hypnotised by the fantasy of wealth, mouthing the mantra of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street character Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good,” without quite awakening to its hollow sound…

Is greed the new morality? Donald Trump accessing the high office of the US presidency acclaims wealth as a positive diktat — if he’s so rich, with such an expensive wife, then surely he must be doing everything right. By extension, flaunting one’s money is easily conflated with setting a good example.

…

This brings me to a “sort-of-song” I dug out from my archives, that fits the topic well because of its lyrics: “I wear Gucci and Chanel/It don’t mean I’m superficielle” and also, “Vanity is my virtue.” In 2011, I was just discovering songwriting, and making music with my childhood friend Stéphane Lefrançois. In his London studio one night, we recorded this electronic jam, and called it Shut up and Strut It.

Nat Ya · Shut Up and Strut It w Stef Lef 7/11 Studio Jam - London, 2011

Shut Up and Strut It

I wear Gucci and Chanel

It don’t mean I’m superficielle

All this baby is for you

You know I dress it up for you

Vanity is my virtue

I don’t play hard to get

I play never-gonna-happen

Shut up and strut it

Shut up and strut it…..

“Shut up and strut it… Shut up and strut it… Shut up and strut it…” Round and round we go on the “gold plated hamster wheel,” addicts who yearn for the day when consumption will satisfy us — which, by design, it never will.

…

Generation Wealth is available for streaming on Amazon Prime — here are the links for America & the UK.

For a fascinating history of Edward Bernays and how he applied Freud’s theories to create modern mass consumer culture, The Century of the Self is a mammoth film, available on YouTube here.

Incognito Feminist — I didn’t Mean to Turn You On

I wrote a song called Sugar Daddy and it gave men the wrong idea

A number of years ago, when I was just starting to learn music production, I went out of London with a couple of friends to explore the Peak district with an organised hiking group. Over the course of the weekend, I met a married man who took a shine to me.

I don’t believe that Daniel was the cheating type. However, he did ask me to join him in his room one night after dinner. I didn’t.

Nat Ya, Sugar Daddy, 2014

First and foremost, extra-marital frolics were not my bag. But I thought we could still be friends. Plus, there was something I wanted from this man.

A well-connected lover of the arts, Daniel was on the board of several cultural organisations. He ran a super successful marketing business and lived in a fabulous house in Holland Park. He’d been married to the mother of his two teenage kids for twenty years. His wonderful wife was writing a novel; he showed me pictures of his children and told me all about them. Daniel was a CEO kind of family guy.

For some reason, he was very interested in who I was and in the music I was writing. He told me I was talented and he was very encouraging; he wasn’t shy about telling me that he fancied me, either.

We only saw each other once after that weekend; the friendship hit a dead-end.

However, the relationship troubled me for some time because it brought up lots of mixed feelings. I thought Daniel could open all the windows of my world. I wanted his support and I craved his approval. I felt both hopeful and compromised.

These feelings were a telltale sign of my own insecurities. Surely, I wasn’t the only woman who felt disempowered and scared of life. I was just another full-grown girl with daddy issues.

I tried to make sense of why the Lover-as-Father figure had such appeal, and wrote a song called Sugar Daddy

Nat Ya · Sugar Daddy - London, 2014

Sugar Daddy

Oh Daddy! Daddy…. Save me! Won’t you save me? Won’t you be my Sugar Daddy? Ohh Daddy… Won’t you be my Sugar Daddy?

You make me feel like you know me better than I know myself

Sugar Daddy… Daddy… Sugar, Sugar, Sugar Daddy

You look at me like you raised me and actually cared

Sugar Daddy… Daddy… Sugar, Sugar, Sugar Daddy

I’ll bring a messy sort of sexiness to that domestic emptiness

Won’t you be my Sugar Daddy? Won’t you be my Sugar Daddy?

Honeysuckle cuddles, I’ll give you what you want Daddy

Daddy! What you want… Sugar Daddy! What you want… Sugar, Sugar, Sugar Daddy

Won’t you be my Sugar Daddy?

Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!

Honeysuckle cuddles, I’ll give you what you want Daddy!

The song is funny, right?

Sugar Daddy was meant to be a dark feminist statement. But I found that music industry guys who listened to it somehow got really turned on by it and took it as an indication I might be keen to sleep with them.

The Hitchcock Psycho murder-in-the-shower reference was lost on these men, along with my dramatisation of female angst, desperation and sexual confusion.

Nat Ya, London 2014

Anyway — here I am several years wiser. My boyfriend is only a few years younger than my dad, but I don’t really see him as my Sugar Daddy. Still, I wish he were.