everything I love about trains, I learned from the Japanese
When I was still young and living in the Philippines, my father would come back from his occasional trips abroad with videotapes in his suitcase. Sometimes, they were three hours of American Saturday morning cartoons, which we would watch and re-watch until the tapes wore out. Other times, they were bootleg recordings taken from some hotel's HBO channel. One of these was an old, moderately dubbed anime called Galaxy Express 999.
It was a movie about a twelve year old boy in a sci-fi slum town where humans are downtrodden and everyone aspires to immortality in a machine body. He meets a woman who offers to help him on his quest, by giving him a ticket on the Galaxy Express 999, a spacefaring train that travels to the Andromeda Galaxy, where the machine bodies are made. Along the way, they visit planets, watch the galaxy float by and hang out with a cast of loners, vagabonds and space pirates. So, at a young age, the film had imprinted in me a love for taking the train, watching the scenery and keeping company with weirdos.
I'm writing this while taking the train from Boston to Philadelphia and watching the endless city that is the Boston-DC metropolitan corridor unfurl outside my window. It is not quite the BAMA Sprawl of Gibson's vision, but outside my window there are a hundred lights that look like stars and a galaxy of humanity going about their Friday night.
I also have the remains of a sushi donburi tucked undereneath my seat, because one thing that I learned while taking the train through Japan, it's that sushi tastes better while you're gliding across the countryside at 100 mph
It was a movie about a twelve year old boy in a sci-fi slum town where humans are downtrodden and everyone aspires to immortality in a machine body. He meets a woman who offers to help him on his quest, by giving him a ticket on the Galaxy Express 999, a spacefaring train that travels to the Andromeda Galaxy, where the machine bodies are made. Along the way, they visit planets, watch the galaxy float by and hang out with a cast of loners, vagabonds and space pirates. So, at a young age, the film had imprinted in me a love for taking the train, watching the scenery and keeping company with weirdos.
I'm writing this while taking the train from Boston to Philadelphia and watching the endless city that is the Boston-DC metropolitan corridor unfurl outside my window. It is not quite the BAMA Sprawl of Gibson's vision, but outside my window there are a hundred lights that look like stars and a galaxy of humanity going about their Friday night.
I also have the remains of a sushi donburi tucked undereneath my seat, because one thing that I learned while taking the train through Japan, it's that sushi tastes better while you're gliding across the countryside at 100 mph