Wednesday 3 December 2008

1. Queen of Cool


I'm supposed to be the Queen of Cool, y'know? I mean, since I fit all the trendy clichés, I thought for a long time that my life would be easy like in a magazine. Felt sorry for the others though, but can't fight who I am. Where should I start? Pretty face, yeah, that's a good start. And the hippest gene pool, allowing me be the perfect object of phantasm of globalized advertisement culture - fitting in the pages of a Benetton catalogue as well as in the arty-fartiest fantasy of upper-class connoisseurs of what the world should be. At my age – even before I guess -, my mother was the Japanese mascot (she’s hate me if she’d read this) of some New York experimental cinema higher circle where she inspired those who would become the greatest icons of the movement – often long after they gave up in front of the general indifference. These grand men of course never gave any credit to her own cinema work, since she was so sexy and exotic… She was half surprised, after all she left Japan because being a woman forbid her any kind of recognition in an art field fuelled by technology, so in the US it was still better.

But in the international language school where she was absently teaching Japanese to wannabe golden boys, she met the most alien guy – the European equivalent of Japanese without the dominant culture: a Finn – quite younger and seemingly foreign to anything, even her own seductiveness. So of course she fell for him (she’d hate my guts even more for this, but first it’s all true, and I have to make my background a little bit exciting, isn’t it?). He was a young computer freak who would later largely contribute to the current general alienation of mobile phone industry. They were at the dawn of a long chaotic impassionate relationship of which I’m a by-product (oh, my mother she’d hate me soooo much after sacrificing her life for her ingrate parasite of a daughter – well the little bit of her life we spent together!). At some point she managed to put hands on prehistoric video equipment and made herself a name as an early pioneer of the new media – or more accurately an early female pioneer, far behind her male colleagues. That was enough to get her some visibility, not in NYC though, but in Germany and France where she relocated – breaking up for the fifth time with her young lover - that would give them the opportunity to reconcile and finally move together in a 25 m2 flat in Paris.

(to be continued...)

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