(Hello again, again.)

Dancers at Akasaka Space Capsule Disco, 2

(This is a sequel to Passing Current number 8: the stories of the people dancing at Akasaka Space Capsule Disco in Tokyo one August night in 1969. People like Mishima Yukio, Kurokawa Kishō and the other Metabolists, the director Toshio Matsumoto and Pîtâ who would star in his Funeral Parade of Roses, Moriyama Daido, Tadanori Yokoo – and tonight’s visitor.)

Terayama Shūji, 寺山 修司, was dancing under the chandeliers of television screens, each playing something different. He was 34. That night he was midway through transforming a radio play into one of the strangest and most nightmarish movies ever made: the story of the children’s revolt, the nihilistic final revolution, turned against the whole of adult society. When the radio play, “Adult Hunting,” was broadcast in 1960, it panicked listeners – it was played straight, like the Mercury Theater’s “War of the Worlds” but more plausible, and people locked their doors and called the police. When filming began on the adaptation, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, in 1970, Terayama’s hope was that the kids recruited for the cast would be incited by the script to actually revolt, spark an insurrection, which he could then film. Not an unreasonable assumption, given his use of the actual street protests happening at the time as context and backdrop for his fictional uprising – a thousand people were being arrested on any given day in the spring of 1970. (The title may sound familiar: Stereolab adopted it for their 1996 album.) His movies were meant to get something, anything, happening; his first full-length picture (also a book and a play) was an instruction: Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets! (NSFW, in a very early–1970s way)

Terayama was born in winter, in 1935, in Aomori. He described the moment of his own birth as the projector of his eyes turned on for the first time, to illuminate the screen of his body. He wanted to be a boxer. His father was an ardent patriot and went off to fight on the Pacific front when Shūji was five; he died of dysentery on what is now Sulawesi in September 1945. By then, the boy Terayama had witnessed firsthand the firebombing of Aomori, the near-complete annihilation of the city overnight, six days before the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. (This is what it looked like in the morning.) The war over, his mother went to work on an American military base at Kyushu, leaving him with his grandparents who ran a movie theater. He lived in a closet at the back, behind the screen, where he went to sleep every night hearing dialogue and music, watching the ghosts of “obscured reverse images.”

As he dances in 1969, Terayama dreams of movies that could satisfy a demand he called “darkness not required in the city at midday.” “Whatever famous picture it is,” says a character in Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets!, “it has no existence outside the darkness. If only one light were to blink on, doesn’t the world disappear?” Terayama wants to make movies that continue to play in the full light of day, that turn the city walls at noon into screens and the duration of life into running time. He wants movies projected by the glow of a cat’s eyes, by an ordinary morning, by the infernal glare of a city on fire. He wants to live through his satirical utopian nightmare of the late 1960s in Japan, with children who turn against everything that came before them, reinventing enslavement, massacre and cruelty in the process. With a budget of about $3500, and a cast of children, Buto dancers, and drag queens from the Tokyo scene, he hopes to stage humanity’s delirious last act in derelict buildings, costume shops, and abandoned factories.

It will be a total failure; while remaining a prolific playwright and author, Terayama’s life as a working filmmaker will lie in work that is increasingly dreamlike, gauzy, shot through with prismatic rainbows and dream sequences and arty softcore porn. He will die in 1983, of complications related to nephrotic syndrome and alcoholism.

A few months after that night in the Space Capsule Disco, Terayama will stage a scene from the revolt in Azabu Park near the German embassy in Tokyo, prompting hundreds of calls to the police about a terrorist force assembling in the center of the city: the child insurrection, awaiting its close-up, and the most darkness-in-the-city-at-midday that his movies will ever be.

“only sick music makes money these days”

Velveteen Rabbit’s Mind Numbing Entertainment delivers the glammed-up, sleazed-out goods, with T. Rex power pop hooks under an inch-thick lacquer of studio gloss polished to a high shine; every corner of this chugging chrome-plated motor has been detailed to glitter. Summer’s not quite over.

and finally

Thoughts on “supertasks” like infinite hotels, Laraudogoita’s Disappearing Bodies, and the limits of Thomson’s Lamp

"The aim of this portal is to describe and provide pictures about all Estonian manors"

Hiding machine-readable information in perturbed glyphs

Please enjoy this masterclass in comedy timing from a pizza

(Thanks for reading, as ever. Hope you’ve been well. Kind of a reboot coming next week with Passing Current 40.)