Houllebecq in Tokyo with Total Control

From DX Zagreb Book Review Column

The following is from my Zagreb Book Review Column published December 2019, written immediately after the last Total Control tour, and recently edited and republished for a collection of similar travel stories. From the introduction:

Reading and travelling – this issue of Distort is a collection of columns written for the Zagreb Book Review… this is heightened experience, the right book and the right line at the right moment…

I tell the story of the books alongside the circumstances I read them in…  the world conspiring to kick head in and that exact second, lazing on the deck of a cruise ship moored outside Vanuatu, reading Dostoevsky while soaking in the sun and the rum, portals opening, possibilities… lazy afternoon in Belgian bar listening to Jacques Brel, reading Simenon, drinking pastis alongside the pimps… in tour van through glorious Polish forest across miserable Polish highway, squint to read Schopenhauer in the fading light, trees reaching to block out the sun while the van shudders code messages carved into the road by vagabonds, a warning… countless variations of the world and the people in it, suddenly the routines and the sham seem wafer-thin, the scale of your body shifts, suddenly you are an enormity, colossal, ready to fight, ready to fuck the world.

I dedicate to bandmates – I edit others out of stories – not to implicate in my excess and vice. Stories of bands are not mine to tell, they will be told together… cinematic event of the decade…

ILLUSTRATION OF HOUELLEBECQ TETSUO BY COSMO

Houllebecq in Tokyo with Total Control, November 2019

Take note of the date. This is the last time I was on tour, the last time I was outside Australia. A long four years, half of it spent under the Melbourne lockdown. I think of the time in Tokyo reading Houellebecq with a great deal of anxiety, an appropriate demarcation between the person I was and the monster I have become.

Houellebecq is the greatest living writer. I first read his novel Atomised in 2002… it made as profound an impact on my life as Nietzsche had when I was a teen… I was incapable of being in the world once I started reading Nietzsche or Houellebecq, my life seemed trivial and my physical desires an annoyance, an imposition between me and the page.

My experience reading Houellebecq: arrested, hunched over the book, in a state of anxiety and turmoil, ignoring food and sleep until starved and fatigued. His books describe the imminent future and have a speculative and prophetic quality, which is why a comparison to the prophet Nietzsche is not inappropriate. They share a dark and wicked sense of humour.

I was once chastised by a friend for recommending Houellebecq.  She told me that reading Atomised was a dreadful experience that sent her into a profound depression and suggested I was irresponsible and cruel for the recommendation, like giving a child a syringe to play with.

I have lived in a state of dread for as long as I remember, and so I have read Atomised five times with voracious appetite, and every time I read it I am gripped and do not want it to end.

The fourth attempt at reading Atomised was in Vietnam and Tokyo with Total Control: I started it early one morning when we were in Vietnam, smoking a strong cigarette and drinking a sweet coffee outside the hotel we were staying, watching bright slivers of koi dart through their pond. I got a couple pages in and got a sharp jolt of panic and realised I was tempting crisis and alienation from the people I love, reading a book like this in the early morning. No way to start a day. Travelling with friends, should be reading something light, fun. I set strict boundaries, only read it when I was in my hotel room, alone.

At night, we would return from a meal and say our goodnights, I’d set the AC on full blast, head down for a cigarette and say my prayers to the koi gods. The feeling of stepping from the languor of dense humidity into the sharp cold of my room would prepare me for Houllebecq, and in this way I got through most of the book before we left Vietnam for Japan.

I should mention Yukio Mishima, an author capable of this Houellebecq affect, of holding me in a state one breath away from a panic attack and gripping me so tight that I cannot look away as some monstrous, tragic, terrible event is announced and described in agonising, slow detail… all of Mishima, Flannery O’Connor ‘A Good Man…’, Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov… do you understand obsession…

On our first night in Tokyo, I hit club.

I don’t hit club often, I am not club man, I invariably get into an altercation. The bouncers you see outside of club are there to keep people like me out. If I know the owner or staff and can find my way into the back room, then I love club, I like rum and coke and bartenders with heavy hands, I like the sound of bass pounding through the walls as I’m discussing the finer points of Polanski’s mid-period with some random freak I just met… but I don’t like to dance mashed in a crowd, I only dance competitively and for good money… I’m not good with strangers touching me uninvited, I don’t like sour odour of amphetamine or ecstasy sweat, sweet blend of Issey Miyake and Sauvage, wet hair products, lychee Cruisers, viagra…

But, in Japan, I make exception and attend club because the night is in tribute to Katsuhiro Otomo, the mind behind Akira, and because in Japan things that I normally do not enjoy doing in my own country – club, jazz café, vintage clothing, waiting at traffic lights – are tolerable and even enjoyable, alongside the myriad things Japan has that I can’t enjoy in my own country – smoking after a meal inside the restaurant or smoking at the bar or smoking inside an air BNB – and these are all good reasons why I head club.  

Each room of club was playing different dance music, and scenes from Akira were projected on each wall, the ceiling, the floor… I floated through club in a state of anticipation and joy, trying to catch a glimpse of Otomo… I saw my favourite scenes projected on the colourfully dressed and stylish young Japanese club people: the collapsing bridge, the grotesque mutation of Tetsuo, a long shot of Kaneda speeding through Neo-Tokyo...

I was drinking champagne and I felt invincible, saturated with these violent images after a relatively sedate week in Vietnam… Vietnam was lazing in the thick heat, eternity pool over the city,  eating crushed pigeon and digging the sharp tiny bones out of my bleeding gums, eating Pho soup with various offals, drinking cocktails with Total Control in tiny neighbourhood bars, looking out at Saigon from the deck of a slow moving ship – the best place to see a city is from the water, on a ship or in an eternity pool high above it – the smell of the greasy river, walking around in lethargic manner buying bootleg fashionite accessories and weaving in and out of the endless torrents of traffic, endless motorcycles, … you could get pretty strong codeine over the counter in Vietnam, valium too, so the flight out of Vietnam was a blissful high.

I was still buzzed from the residuals of that and the champagne when I was in club and a stranger approached me with an offer, a way to make a lot of money without great risk, a potential for disaster, but also fame and glory...

Later that night, failing to make the money but blessed by spontaneous adventure, I returned to the flat where Total Control were staying. Everyone was asleep in bedrooms, a space on the couch was made for me, but I could not sleep, I was over-stimulated, so I took Atomised into the bathroom with me and I got through one line before shutting it, tight, and abandoning it, terrified of losing the night and the blissful comedown to an anxiety ridden hour in the bath reading Houellebecq…

I read one line of Houellebecq in Tokyo with Total Control, returned to the lounge and lay there cycling through Akira until sleep took me… I read one line of Houellebecq in Tokyo with Total Control…

***

More from my Zagreb Book Review column in this spirit:

Nietzsche with Straightjacket Nation in Slovakia

Graham Greene in KX with Station Model Violence

Genet and Chris Kraus in Copenhagen with Iceage

Herman Hesse in Detroit with 9 Shocks Terror

Dostoevsky in New Caledonia

Hemingway in New Orleans with Total Control

Simenon in KX with Station Model Violence

Cioran in Berlin with Total Control