Urusei Yatsura 4 – Lum the Forever (Yamazaki Kazuo)

This film is a salutary lesson for anyone who still thinks anime is for kids, and I don’t mean in an icky, tenticular way. ‘Lum the Forever’ is not only the most bizarre animated movie I’ve seen, it probably outweirds all but the strangest live action films. If David Lynch was ever to direct anime, the result could well be something like this.

It’s surprising, as the original comics mix SF, slapstick and sex comedy. Very successfully, too; over 200 TV episodes, most of which are highly amusing, but about as subtle as a brick. However, the movies have always pushed animation story telling into new areas. UY’s creator, Rumiko Takahashi, occupies much the same, near-divine position in the manga world that Hayao Miyazaki does in the anime one, with strips like ‘Ranma 1/2’, ‘Maison Ikkoku’ and her ‘Rumic World’ series all proving immensely popular.

Some background first. The heroine is Lum, a frighteningly cute alien (sweet little horns, striped bikini) who came to Earth as part of a powerful invasion force. Due to circumstances too lengthy to explain here (involving Lum’s bikini and a sucker gun – as I said, subtle as a brick!) the alien fleet left, but Lum stayed behind with her ‘Darling’ Ataru Moroboshi, high-school student and full-time lech. His wandering eye gives him much grief, as Lum’s touch can deliver an impressive number of Volts when she gets miffed. Also drifting in and out are the strangest collection of oddballs, both alien and earthling, this side of Westminster.

UY’s appeal is partly because it’s often easy to understand, even in Japanese. However, ‘Lum the Forever’ is almost unique in that it’s harder to handle in a subtitled version. You’re forced to cope with things that could be mentally ignored in the Japanese release: it’s one thing for a film to make no sense when it’s in a foreign language, quite another if you can understand the dialogue. Though the film is perfectly coherent, each plot point clear as crystal, it’s like a shattered mirror: every fragment gives a reflection, but the pieced-together whole shows only distortion.

While I’m normally opposed to the plot-synopsis-as-review mentality, in this case I’ll make an exception, as the story is the movie. It starts off simply: Lum, Ataru and their friends are making a movie, re-enacting a local legend. As part of this, they chop down an ancient, dying cherry tree – and that’s when things start to get weird. The weather becomes unseasonable; the town is plagued with dragonflies; and most worrying of all, Lum begins to fade away. The first thing to go is her “Ultra-Mega-Fantastic-Shock”, which now only tickles; her flying ability dwindles, and vanishes; her horns also go; and she begins to evaporate from photographs…

The rest of the inhabitants aren’t immune and have vivid dreams – or are they? It’s never made clear, and the film blurs to zero distinctions between reality, dreams, the film-within-the-film and hallucinations. This area was also covered in ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, the second UY movie – the whole town is sucked into Lum’s dreams – but that possessed structure and coherence. While I felt this worked against the subject matter, it’s still excellent, and is certainly more accessible.

Mendo, producer of the film-within-the-film, theorises that Tomobiki, their town, has developed a consciousness and is exerting it’s will to shape external reality. If Tomobiki is a living entity, with inhabitants as it’s cells, Lum, being an alien, would be regarded as a foreign invader – a disease – and the strange phenomena are symptoms caused by the town’s “immune system” fighting back. It should now be evident that we are not in Saturday morning TV-land here.

Opinion differs on how to break the ‘fever’: Mendo engages in acts of mass destruction, “because it’s something to do”; Ataru runs away; Lum goes in search of the town’s consciousness. But it is Ataru’s deep affection for Lum that finally convinces the town to accept her, and return to normality – whatever that may be.

This film knows, and makes full use of, the things which animation is best at, creating an alternate reality that is both plausibly familiar and totally strange. In ‘Lum the Forever’, the normal and the strange, the trivial and the important, are all treated with equal intensity, and the viewer is left to work out which is which. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle where some pieces are missing, and others are from a different picture altogether.

It’s a hard slog but ultimately worthwhile, as technically, the film is excellent. A grace and style evoke films like ‘Kwaidan’, with a dedicated attention to detail. It’s highly cinematic, using all the armoury of the modern film – compare thiis to Western animation, which has hardly evolved since the early days of Disney. Witness the unanimous adulation heaped on the ballroom sequence in “Beauty and the Beast”, by those who hadn’t seen a zoom in a cartoon before. And it took HAL-like computing power for Disney to achieve things no more impressive, just more blatantly trumpeted, than Kitty Studio managed without any Oscar nominations.

It could never be made as a live-action movie. Well, it might be possible – with a budget the size of Roseanne Barr’s lunchbill, and if you were prepared to hang around for FX technology to catch up a decade or two – but even so, the end result would not be as compelling, plausible or impressive. Deeply strange, and a million miles from the banalities of dancing candlesticks.

[Various bits of ‘Urusei Yatsura’ are being released with subtitles by Anime Projects over the course of ’94. ‘Lum the Forever’ should, all being well, hit the shops in October, though you are strongly recommended to start with something easier like a few TV episodes! Contact Anime Projects, 64 Stanley Mead, Bradley Stoke, Bristol, BS12 0EG. Tel (0454) 619170]

Rumic World: Fire Tripper

Here’s the spot to review Manga’s latest arrival (must resist the temptation to call them Island World now!), the first UK release based on Rumiko Takahashi manga. As mentioned earlier, ‘Rumic World’ covers one-off stories, presumably written when she doesn’t fancy a 36-volume series, but like virtually everything else she’s done (shades of Stephen King?), they’ve become OAVs. [It’s also a good place to grovel: “Mermaid’s Forest” isn’t strictly part of the Rumic World…] The heroine here is a girl, caught in an explosion with a neighbour’s son and hurled back to violent medieval times. There she meets the young, guardian of a village, who decides he’s going to marry her – whether she wants it or not! She gradually falls in love, but then discovers a disturbing possibility about her origin.

This goes against the grain of most previous Manga releases, which have been mainly “brain-off” entertainment. As with ‘Lum the Forever’, you have to concentrate; here, to follow the time-line and keep track of which character is which (and indeed when!). But expend the effort, and you’ll be rewarded by something that’s distinctly different and is a challenging and imaginative story, though the translation is, er, interesting (“You’re all talking through your bums”) and the cover picture a tad misleading. It’s very close to the manga, unsurprisingly so, as Takahashi is known to oversee the transferal process, with power to fire and hire at will. The animation is notably different from the more realistic approach of, for example, ‘Doomed Megalopolis’, and may initially take a little getting used to. But you’d better do it, as with the rest of ‘Rumic World’ and ‘Urusei Yatsura’ to come, 1994 could well be her year. B+

What they say

What they mean

HM Customs & Excise –
enforcing your return to Victorian morals.

“Bad Luck! This package just met the Dover Customs Casuals! Previously, we could do what we liked to it without giving a damn. Now. thanks to the Citizen’s Charter. things are different. We still do what we like, but now have to pretend we care, hence this patronising little note. Insincerities aside, we chose to spend our time, and therefore your money, shredding this parcel, hoping for something juicy to watch on our next get-together. Unfortunately, the contents were entirely innocent. We sat through the whole damn film, praying for something that would let us send a lynch mob to ransack your home without a warrant, but found nothing to offend even our squeaky clean sensibilities. This time. you’re lucky. But order anything warmer than a Disney movie, and we’ll be up your ass like a polecat on heat. We’ll be watching…”

Recently, TC was able to talk to three hard working Martial Arts personalities, during a hectic SF convention at the Arcadian Hotel in Birmingham.

John Carrigan is a self-professed “action-actor” and martial artist, the guiding light behind ‘Heroes For Hire’, a stunt team demonstrating fighting arts at charity events, and an actor in his own right. He’s appeared in ‘The Bill’, ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, ‘Lovejoy’, ‘ST:TNG’, the movie ‘Double X’, and a recent independent drama, the Twilight Zone-styled ‘Hollow Man’.

Po-Ling Choi is described as a Hong Kong “action-actress extraordinaire”, and as well as working on ‘Impact’ with Bey, has appeared in several features, including the “quickie” The Good, The Bad and the Dangerous, filmed in the very hotel this interview was conducted (and also provided this article’s title!).

Bey Logan edits ‘Impact’, the martial arts/action film magazine, as well as being a writer-producer working in the UK & HK. He is half of Beymark International, a production company dedicated to producing Anglo-Eastern action films. Recently, he acted as Line Producer on “Killer’s Romance”, inspired by ‘Crying Freeman’, and available on Colourbox Video.

What inspired you to start in martial arts?

PLC: In Hong Kong, it’s traditional that when you’re young, if your father or relatives do martial arts, then you do martial arts as well. It’s a popular thing for girls to do kung fu in films now, so that’s why I’ve started doing the same.

BL: What got me involved was initially Bruce Lee. I think that probably 99% of people in this country involved in martial arts and martial arts movie-making were probably inspired by him.

JC: My involvement came just before Bruce Lee because I got beaten up quite badly in 1972 by six individuals, and I thought I either dig a hole or do something about it. David Carradine spun onto the scene and I saw a few episodes of ‘Kung Fu’. I thought he was good until I went to see ‘The Big Boss’ with Bruce Lee and that was the springboard. It was basically self-defence and then Bruce.

You’ve described yourselves as “action-actors”. What came first? Was it the martial arts, the stunt work, and then you decided to move into acting?

PLC: I was acting before – I was interested in acting when I was a child, and then with the rise of kung-fu women in movies, I added the kung fu. I was acting before kung-fu women were popular.

What do you find the hardest part of your career?

PLC: Remembering the moves during fight scenes. Not to get hit, to hit the right people.

BL: The hardest thing for me is getting financing for films. I’ve got a lot of ideas, and there’s tremendous potential in our stunt team and the people around us. That’s why it’s great: the thing we did here at the Arcadian, John’s film “Hollow Man” – that’s the way things get done. But the biggest stumbling block to creativity is that it is show business, and without the business, there ain’t no show.

JC: The hardest thing is to keep the dream alive, through the days when you think “I’ll never get there”, and not to listen to yourself, to keep the enthusiasm, to pass it on.

Have you ever been hurt?

JC: I’ve been hurt too numerous times to mention in martial arts, because when you train six days a week, you hitch up some marks. We say it’s not the years, it’s the mileage! In films, in stunt work, I’ve had loads of minor things. I did a twenty-five foot roof fall where you somersault, and for every six feet you fall, you go a foot out – when I got to the boxes, my kneecap went over the side of the box and almost snapped the wrong way. It took me 3 months to get right from that. And I dislocated my ankle, and the bone burst through the side of my foot…
How do you feel about the risks?

JC: It goes with the territory. I don’t just want to be a stuntman and burst into flames. If I’m going to do something like “Hollow Man”, if I did get injured, I want people to know it was me doing it, me as the character I was playing, then it’s worth it. But if I step in for a character who gets all the glory, and I get badly injured for five seconds of footage, it’s not justified because my living is my body.

Have you ever consider going behind the cameras, perhaps directing?

PLC: I don’t really know how to direct. In Hong Kong it’s very difficult for females. There are no female directors who have come from being actresses.

JC: I’d like to be in both places! I’ve not been trained as a director, but I know what I like to see, and I know how I feel when I’ve been directed, and I know what I think was wrong when I was directed. Whenever I’m on a film set, I’m never sitting around chewing my nails, I’m always with the make-up people, the directors, producers, sound-men, trying to learn and assimilate what the total picture is – a bit like a martial art, you try and get the total picture, rahter than just a segment. I’d love to direct – maybe one day…

Who are you favourite martial arts actors? [NB This interview took place before the unfortunate death of Brandon Lee]

PLC: Jackie Chan in Hong Kong, and Sashi Mitchell in the West.

BL: In the States, I like Brandon Lee and Thomas Ian Griffith, who has made a film called ‘Excessive Force’ which is really brilliant. These are two guys who are coming up, who are well worth checking out, trust me on that! From Hong Kong, it’s got to be Donnie Yen, who’s a good friend of mine, but I think pound-for-pound he’s the finest martial arts actor in the world.

JC: From the past, it has to be Bruce Lee. I think Brandon Lee is going to take the world by storm very soon. I think Van Damme is good, but I don’t like the re-use of the same kick over and over, it’s getting to be the ruination of some films. Cynthia Rothrock uses it all the time now. I think Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee. Steven Seagal has presence, not much as a martial artist, even though he’s very effective, but as a person.

What’s your opinions of the Western martial arts actors in general?

PLC: They’re pretty rubbish! I don’t like watching them.

BL: I think a head-to-head comparison is unfair. In Hong Kong, you have actors doing martial arts, and in America, you’ve martial artists learning how to act. In Hong Kong, they try to do martial arts in a theatrical way, which will entertain that audience – it’s one reason films don’t translate well in the West. In America, they’re basically trying to show real martial arts, aikido, kickboxing, whatever; there’s a kind of reality there. It’s interesting to see cross-pollination, like Brandon Lee’s “Rapid Fire” which combines the two, with the grittiness of a Seagal movie, but the action sequences are very theatrical and Hong Kong style. That movie, I think, is the first one to bridge the gap between the two.

JC: If you could get a balance between East and West as Bey says. Samo Hung, what he does is incredible, but Western audiences wouldn’t pay just to see him as a character – with the fight scenes, they would. If you can get that kind of action with the quality acting that some people do… I recognise the distinction between Chinese and Western – they both have their merits.

This next question is perhaps something of a controversial one…

BL: Fire away, I love controversy!

It’s said that some movies are shot at 21 to 22 frames per second, and then shown at the full 24 frames per second to give an illusion of speed. How true it this?

BL: I don’t think it’s controversial, that’s a technique of film- making that’s used in Hong Kong and again it’s to do with the theatrical nature of it. They’re not interested in realism. Their attitude is that we are filming a live action cartoon in which people happen to hit each other, and one of the aspects of cartoon making is that the pace of action is substantially faster than real human beings move – that translates onto the screen. But I’d say, if you don’t like it, if that sounds fake to you, look at the last reel of ‘Showdown in Little Tokyo’ and the last reel of ‘Police Story’ with an audience who like that kind of movie. Not the whole film, just the last reel. And then take a straw poll to see who liked what film…

So you would say that undercranking the camera in a martial arts film is like the special effects in a science fiction movie?

BL: Absolutely.

How true are the stories about Triad involvement in the HK movie industry?

BL: Triads are a fact of life in Hong Kong – they always have been in Chinese culture. The problem is that they have stepped up their involvement, more people getting greedier. One of the famous ploys that causes a lot of problems is when they go to a famous actor, set up a temporary money- laundering operation, a small film company, and say to the actor, “Do a film for us at 1/3 of your normal rate, as a favour to the ‘boys'”. The gang will release this movie and after a couple of months they close up the company, take the money and run. In principle, that worked okay.

Now, you get ten guys saying to this actor, “Please do this film”, and the actor’s thinking “I’ll be doing a year’s worth of films for no money, I don’t want to do that”, and the ones he says “No” to are the ones who are getting stroppy. This is where you hear about managers getting kidnapped, and all the other horrible stuff going on. I think it’s not that the Triads are involved with the film-making, whether that’s good or bad is immaterial, it happens. What I think is the problem is that there has been an unrealistic approach to the film industry by the Triads, and that is the cause of the recent problems, and the march and the protests. It wasn’t actually Artists Against Triads, it was Artists Against Violence – violence being perpetrated against actors or actors’ managers.

Do you think it’s less sinister to the people who are involved than it appears to us from a Western viewpoint?

BL: Much as it would be great if these things didn’t exist, they will exist, they’ve always existed , and whether they are benevolent or malign depends on which side of the fence you are on. Certainly, everything Oriental has a mystique to it; that’s as true for the gangs as anything else.

[Thanks to the three interviewees for their time, and a special tip of the TC hat to Bey Logan for translating for Po-Ling]

---

Ouch!

Truckee, California – A tree trimmer who was found with his throat cut committed suicide with a chainsaw. investigators said on Wednesday. Officials believed it was the first such suicide in the United States; Richard Possehl. 27, was found dead near his pickup truck in Truckee, Eastern California. on June 27. the Nevada County sheriff’s department said. His neck and spinal cord were cut and a chainsaw was found lying next to the body. State Department of Justice officials recreated the killing to show it was possible for Possehl to have committed suicide in this way.

Plastic surgeon shot by defender of “aryan beauty”

Chicago – A white supremacist motivated by his hatred for anyone “feeding off aryan beauty” has confessed to the execution-style killings of a Chicago-area plastic surgeon and a San Francisco hairdresser, officials said on Tuesday. Jonathan Haynes, 34, will undergo psychological testing to determine his fitness for trial in the killing of Dr Martin Sullivan, whom witnesses say he gunned down on Friday. In a suburban chicago court on monday, the dark-haired Haynes, who refused a lawyer’s services, said: “I condemn fake aryan cosmetics. I condemn bleached blond hair, tinted blue eyes and fake facial features brought by plastic surgery.”

Snap decision clears Aussie who shot crocodile

Darwin, Australia – An australian who shot a crocodile and cut it up for meat will not be punished for killing a protected species, a court decided on Thursday. Fishing guide Brett Smith, 27, normally uses a plastic baseball bat to fend off man-eating saltwater crocodiles. He told a magistrate’s court the beast that made for him last June would not give up and he shot it in self-defence. He later cut up the crocodile so as not to waste the meat. “Crocs come up to your boat trying to take your fish, so you just go (whack) on the head with the baseball bat and they’ll, um, well it usually gets rid of them,” he said.

Copyright copycats cop it

Beijing – A Chinese state-run publishing house has been found guilty of pirating studies on copyright piracy, the Guangming Daily said on Monday. The Beijing People’s Court fined two editors and the China Procuratorial Publishing Company for plagiarising reports by government researcher Zheng Chengsi, it said. They stole whole sections of the studies Zheng wrote for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on computer software protection, intellectual property rights and publishing law. “They took his ideas as their own and represented them as new ideas,” the newspaper said.

This is merely the tip of the iceberg. without looking too hard, I found:

• Swedish anti-crime film star jailed
• Anti-graft candidate arrested for bribery
• Japan drug-squad policeman fired for drug use

which makes you wonder what Mary Whitehouse gets up to in her spare time…

Readers who’ve been with TC for a while may recall an earlier article, in which I related my stress-filled experiences with automobiles and concluded that there was no point having a car as long as I was living in London. So why am I now the possessor of a driving licence, and a Renault 5 named The Beast? (So called, by the way, because it isn’t one – save for its ability to chew large lumps of my money come tax, MoT and insurance time)

To deal with the former, I passed my test at the third attempt. This is vaguely perverse – I fail twice in the wilds of Scotland, then succeed in the Dante-esque atmosphere of London. No problems. Bit of an anti-climax really; I didn’t even get to feel ultranervous, a work colleague having supplied me with some beta-blockers, which she’d been prescribed in the past for some reason. Whether they had any real effect or whether it was purely psychological, I don’t know, but that day, if you’d cut my throat, liquid nitrogen would have flowed out.

Having passed the test, my kneejerk reaction was to buy a car in case I forgot how to drive, in some form of post-test traumatic stress syndrome. And by chance, the brother of a guy I knew was selling his car; I thought this was less likely to be a lemon. Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. It went beautifully when I test-drove it; after I’d bought the creature, it arrived under it’s own steam with no problems; but after stopping outside the front door, it absolutely refused point-blank to start. This was when it got its name – it simultaneously received several others, none of which are printable here. Fortunately, it was a new points and plugs job, so one service later, it was going like a dream (albeit one of those slightly worrying dreams where people keep smiling at you), and I could sample the delights of London traffic on my own.

There’s a famous Disney cartoon, the name of which escapes me, in which Goofy undergoes a Jekyll & Hyde transformation whenever he gets into his car. I laughed when I first saw this. I’m not laughing now. On the roads of London, psychosis = survival, pure and simple – do unto other before they do unto you. This is most notable somewhere like the Elephant and Castle, a massive double roundabout South of the Thames. The Highway Code gives elaborate instructions on how to negotiate roundabouts, but at the E&C, following these would be suicidal. The only way to survive is to get in the left lane, and stay there till your exit. Otherwise, you will be ground up and spat down Walworth Road like tinned spam, regardless of whether or not you actually wanted to go to Walworth.

The car came ready dented, saving me the bother of doing it myself. While mere cosmetic damage, I think this acts like the black-and-yellow markings on certain species of caterpillars, warning predators to keep away: the message with regard to my car is “I don’t care, my no-claims is gone anyway – do you feel lucky, punk…?” Which is actually a lie, my no-claims bonus is pristine and intact. Good job too, as the insurance is punitive (SW2 would seem to in the same insurance group as Sarajevo and the Bronx) – and getting worse. Despite a 30% discount this year, it still went up by twenty quid, and at this rate in one more year, I’ll have paid out more in insurance than I did for the damn car.

The psychosis induced by my car takes several other flavours. Firstly, will it work? The trauma of it’s ‘birth’ means that I’ve adopted a ritual mantra on getting into it: “Hope it starts, ha ha ha”. It does, usually, as long as follow the rules; the cassette player must be switched off, the choke must be in and pulled out only when you twist the key, and the blood of a virgin must be smeared in a pentangle shape across the bonnet.

Stage two is en-route psychosis. On the journey, every rumble is magnified into a piston preparing to shear a flaming path through the engine. The car is constantly about to run out of petrol – not helped by a gauge which reads ‘full’ if the tank has more than three hydrocarbon molecules in it – and every turning is The Wrong Way and will lead you straight into an ambush by urban punks or rural inbreds, depending on location. This may seem a tad exaggerated coming from someone who’s driven through South Central LA, in a nice shiny hire car, with Pop Will Eat Itself playing at full blast, but the major difference is, that time I didn’t know and ignorance truly was bliss. Even with a map, perfect instructions and another car to follow, my innate sense of direction will still mean that I unerringly screw up, while my subconscious screens selected scenes from ‘Deliverance’.

When I get to my destination, I then have to endure the third phase. This is the paranoia of separation, and can be summed up in the question “Have I left my lights on?”, asked of oneself at roughly twenty second intervals. For variety, this may occasionally be changed to “Did I lock the door?” or “Have I been towed away?”. The last is a perpetual terror, as the regulations about when and where you can park in London are obscure, to say the least. However, to all intents, they may be summed up as “You can’t”.

Becoming a driver has even made me a nastier pedestrian. I can no longer pass a zebra-crossing without suppressing an urge to use it gratuitously. There are two alternative methods: either cross very, very slowly, or don’t stop on the pavement at all, boldly striding out and forcing cars to brake suddenly. It’s possible to induce some brilliant ‘discussions’ between drivers if you time it right, though I recommend a gazelle-like agility in case you encounter David Carradine.

On the other hand, I’m a lot more careful in the evenings. Driving in the dark makes you realise just how small and invisible pedestrians are. I live in mortal fear that some night there’ll be a thump as I drive across a zebra-crossing, and I’ll be able to supply add a new punchline to the joke “What’s black and white and red all over?”

The car does have it’s uses; last summer, during the cricket season, it provided transport to the obscure corners of London where Tulse Hill Cricket Club (motto: “No opponent is too crap”) played matches. I’d always thought East Cheam was a figment of Tony Hancock’s imagination, but thanks to my car, I’ve played there (albeit very badly).

Then there was the house move, when a good few shuttle-runs were done between Tummons Gardens and Perran Road, though I actually hired a transit van for the weekend, to break the back of the possession-shifting. That was surprisingly good fun to drive, as everyone (even Volvo drivers) gave it right of way. I imagine survival instinct takes over when you see several tons of van, with the suspension crushed onto it’s axles, hurtling towards you with a manic Scotsman grinning wildly at the wheel.

Thirdly, while an A-reg Renault 5 does not attract women in quite the same way as a Ferrari Testosterone, it does allow you to offer lifts to cute babes. ‘Nuff said, though be warned that significant negative cool points will be earned if you leave your lights on and the battery is flattened to gold-leaf levels. Car-pushing is not romantic.

Fourthly, I now have the freedom to visit all those places in Britain I’ve wanted to see. Except that, in the two years since getting the car, it’s been outside the M25 four times: to High Wycombe for cricket, to Birmingham and Sheffield for anime conventions, and to Scotland for a week at home. Most of said week was spent recovering from the drive up, the highlight of which was going round – or rather over – a roundabout on the A1 at about Mach 4.

This experience was a result of motorway madness, that interesting condition where after a while, 80 mph seems like a slow crawl and, especially at night, the whole road takes on the appearance of a video game. Find yourself looking for the smart bombs, and it’s time to stop for a dose of sanity in a service station, or at least the warped version of sanity on display there. This usually means playing a real video game, in order to re-establish that hold on sanity.

Overall, I wouldn’t get rid of the car now. Even though it’s only used sporadically, it’s nice to know it’s there – the same could be said for certain parts of my body! But stay tuned for part three, as sitting on my bookshelf is a copy of ‘Crash’ by J.G.Ballard…