(Cross-post from my Substack, sea of clouds)

“My life is changing everyday / In every possible way”

(The Cranberries, “Dreams”)

Alone in the streets with a sole behemoth of a building in front of me–in my mind right now, Roppongi Hills is nothing but a villain’s lair in the background. Fading white LED lamps, broad roads. No car in sight but the black cabs roaming in the main road trying to lure the last night warriors before the last train.

It’s Tuesday, but Friday in my soul. Golden Week is drawing near. I decided on a late-night walk after a day full of movies. I needed to digest all the saturated colors from Wong Kar-Wai movies.

After going around in the neighborhood, I ended up stopping at a local brewery just a block away from Tokyo Tower. A row of eight metal tanks displayed in a wooden wall, its planks distributed vertically. I am sitting at the counter. This counter, also wooden, fits roughly six people. There is a taxidermized deer head on display. Suddenly, as I lift my eyes, raising my glass for the first sip, I realize that the levers for the beer tanks are all made of deer horns. An interesting aesthetic choice. Bold.

Ordering a pint of IPA and asking for the bill were the only words I exchanged during the whole time I was in that place. The staff were too busy tending the tables.

I leave after this one glass. Lightly buzzed, I keep walking.

In my earpieces, The Cranberries–I ended up revisiting Dreams after listening to its Cantopop version by Faye Wong in the Chungking Express soundtrack. Tears start to form as I walk the dim backstreets near Mamiana Park. The wind that comes dries them up before they could even stand a chance.

I come to think of what I called “VHS nostalgia” in my notes. At the same time a leftover from a bygone era, and a precious memento from dear parts of my childhood when everybody was alive and (mostly) well. The recordings are still there, converted into DVD and waiting to be converted to an even newer form of portable media, but boy am I afraid of sobbing when I watch it. Recordings of family reunions at the late grandma’s house, me wearing a white Mickey Mouse shirt, the focus going back and forth throughout the amateur video recording with my dad’s camera before it got stolen during a vacation in 2002. The laughs in the background, the noises from the Sunday broadcast TV programs and commercials, our shared cultural references in the background of a very personal fragment.

The VHS memory scene in the latter half of Fallen Angels (here) reminds me of a similar scene–I don’t know how far it could have been a reference–of the Cowboy Bebop anime (here) that made me cry like a baby when I watched it for the first time. Knowing myself, it’s highly likely that I would still cry if I saw the same scene in the mood I am in now.

Dreams jump in the darkness of the Furukawa stream under the expressway tracks. The start of the second quarter of the 21st century hitting like a rock. A spring night that I will surely miss when July comes.

Crossing the main road, I come back to the shopping district. Shutters closed, faded lights, and black cabs roaming.

I stand in front of McDonald’s, its fluorescent lights but no fluorescent adolescents around it anymore. As the Arctic Monkeys’ song goes, we landed in a very common crisis.

All things considered, the McDonald’s night set, the yorumac, is better; double cheeseburger set for 1080. I chose nuggets instead of fries and they gave me two sauce packs, one inside one outside of the paper bags. I wonder if the staff was confused or if it was a gift as their shift was ending. I remember that when I was in college, I could buy ten cheeseburgers for this price and call it the best munchie’ day ever.

Trash piled up in the streets of the neighborhood. White semi-transparent bags with the golden arcs all throughout it, a whole day of residues from all the people that come here for a meal, a snack, an affordable coffee, a third place to work. The trucks are coming as people leave their first, second, third bar of the night. A staircase of suspicious decisions, each stair up another step closer to the ultimate fucked-uppery.

I like to believe that we are all destined for some kind of miracle, some kind of greatness. Even if this greatness is just an extra pack of barbecue sauce in a late-night meal.

Coming back from this walk, I venture through the neighborhood. Not fast enough to feel like exercise after beer but not slow enough that my food is cold when I reach home. It’s still chilly outside.

I return home with my double cheeseburger, nuggets, and a dream. The music is still flowing from my earpieces. The words keep coming. I decided to change to the suggested playlist based on Dreams in my music app of choice.

In the same playlist sponsored by the algorithm, some indie rock hits from the 1990s keep coming. I didn’t know or had completely forgotten that Courtney Love had a band of her own–Hole. I am surprised. This is pretty good.

As the songs keep coming, I stop whatever I am doing to check the name of one of the featured bands–Sixpence None the Richer–I also found myself wondering how that currency that showed up in Harry Potter books was kind of real–even with those wacky conversion rates, and that they had a “Decimal Day,” when they forced the whole currency into 100 sub-units.

Indeed, when I went to London everything was in decimals and all the books I had read based in the pre- and postwar UK divided the pound into some weird names like shillings and halfpennies.

I thought I got to know this band only today but browsing their tracks on the music app of preference, I find out they had some hits that would play in the university radio station or 90s nostalgia sets throughout my teens, to the point of listening to the intro of There She Goes or Kiss Me and thinking “oh that song.”

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Outro track:

Revisiting and editing this text in a steamy summer night in July, I miss the spring breeze dearly.

I played the song radio for Dreams again.

As I listen to The Cranberries’ life that changes every day in Dreams and the lingering love in Wanted, Keane’s people that keep changing while its lyric self wants to stay and doesn’t understand why people are making this decision to change in Everybody’s Changing, The Smashing Pumpkins’ idealized version of teenage life in 1979, when they ‘were sure we’d never see a change to it all,’ it all resonates very close to home, making a compelling case to believe that we live in cycles of constant change across generations. The 1990s were 30 years ago, but this kind of indie rock is as contemporary as it can be.

In this note, I watched a lecture about the aesthetics of our time, and one of the compelling points was that our past became too accessible¹, and the density of the available archives makes it easier to feel nostalgic. Nostalgic of an era that we didn’t have the chance to live that deeply, but whose aesthetics were a fundamental part of our formative years. One could refer to the sudden rise of Frutiger Aero revival, or Chinese dreamcore as examples of this nostalgic comeback based on available archives.

There is an idealization of the imagery of the time–an optimistic futurism–and a general sense of forgetting how life during that time was, just like our era: complex, dynamic, and being disrupted by new technologies. The lesson from the lecture is that ultimately, a new aesthetics for our times will need to be the result of a synthesis, requiring a shared belief, a shared vision of the future.

1. In terms of civilization archive. As most people in my chronically online generation in Brazil, I am glad Orkut and Fotolog closed down with no archives available, thank you very much. Imagine being haunted by the stupid things we did on the internet from 2004 to 2010. ↩︎