We Might Be Tables

Kondo wa kondo, ima wa ima.

Hirayama wakes at dawn to the sound of a broom sweeping the streets outside his modest flat east of the Sumida River. He makes his bed, marks the page on his book, and goes downstairs to brush his teeth, water his plants, and grab his keys and some spare change before going outside to look at the sky, breathe in, and smile. He grabs a coffee from a nearby vending machine, climbs into his van, and gets his music cassette ready. After a quick swig from his can humorously labelled 'BOSS', Hirayama drives off to begin his day as a cleaner of public toilets in Shibuya.

Wim Wenders' modern masterpiece, Perfect Days, is a complex meditation on work, routine, and meaning. It touches on a vast array of topics such as capitalism and class, existentialism and relationships, and estrangement and grief. Rarely do films feel so well-rounded in their nuanced exploration of context, politics, and aesthetics, while also being piercingly poignant in what they have to say about transcending the limits of the body and spirit.

Perfect Days is undoubtedly one of the great films of the twenty-first century; we could not help but watch it time and again to see and feel everything it has to offer. It is also one that is and will be important in the years to come, owing in no small measure to its thoughtful tone and sublime message, relevant more than ever in a world of growing alienation and individualism.

This latest episode is in two parts: this one on Perfect Days, and the other (right before), on a surprisingly similar film by Akira Kurosawa: Ikiru. We had a fantastic time thinking through both stories' impact, and hope you gain as much from our discussion as we did from the films! As always, we would love to hear your thoughts, so please don't hesitate to reach out to us on Instagram, e-mail, or using a voice note on Spotify!

References:

1) Criterion Collection article by Bilge Ebiri, on Wim Wenders' filmography.

2) Reddit comment on abject loneliness in Perfect Days.

3) Article on the importance of Lou Reed to Wim Wenders and the former's presence in Perfect Days - Wim Wenders' Life Was Saved by Rock and Roll: Lou Reed is a mighty voice in my new film.

4) Dewansh mentions an article about how Perfect Days is a sanitized film. We are not able to link the source here (yet).

5) Dewansh reads something about the person experiencing homelessness. We are not able to link the source here (yet).

6) Aoi Yamada.

[Note: Episode recorded in 2024]

Tokyo, 1952.

Seven years after World War II, Japan's public sector is in shambles: inadequate funding, multi-layered corruption, and bureaucratic apathy have left the people desperate for systemic change. Amidst this turmoil is one man, Watanabe, who has been a civil servant for close to thirty years, busying himself thoughtlessly and monotonously to the point of dehumanisation. However, unbeknownst to anyone, there is something special about him: in less than a year, Watanabe will be dead.

Work. Service. Meaning. What is it all for? Are work and labour the same thing? How have we historically envisioned the importance of work as a social and cultural phenomenon? Under the umbrella of state-capitalism, how do workers become Subjects; what are the tensions between community-oriented and nationalist work; fundamentally, by what processes and associations do we ascribe "value" to certain individual and social projects?

Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa's daring and dioramic critique of the relationship between individual and community, community and nation, and nation and morality is oft-considered one of the greatest films of all time. Its relevance cannot be understated in a time of growing communal tensions, increased global shifts towards the far-right and jingoism and, of course, the further fragmentation of work and labour.

This latest episode is in two parts: the first, on Ikiru, and the second, on a surprisingly similar film by Wim Wenders: Perfect Days. We had a fantastic time thinking through both stories' impact, and hope you gain as much from our discussion as we did from the films! As always, we would love to hear your thoughts, so please don't hesistate to reach out to us on Instagram, e-mail, or using a voice note on Spotify!

References:

1) Ikiru screenplay and Donald Richie

2) The Farewell (Chinese film), directed by Lulu Wang

3) Louis Althusser - Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus

4) Shin Godzilla, directed by Hideaki Anno

5) Living, directed by Oliver Hermanus

6) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

7) Off/Screen article: A Study of Kurosawa's Ikiru

Note: At one point, Shrish refers to Donald Richie as Donald Richardson; we just wanted to apologize for that oversight!

An unfortunately longevous legacy of feminism--particularly its liberal brand from the 1970s--is a willful disregard for and violent erasure of ecological politics, specifically species justice. In her 2011 essay "Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Replacing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism", Greta Gaard surveys the rise and fall of ecofeminist scholarship and activism, noting its frequent clashes with the mainstream. Inspired both by her work and its references, as well as our own academic pursuits into the ecological critique of gender liberation, this is a conversation that has been long in the making. We hope that this serves as the first of many necessary entries for a series on "eco-social critique" (we just made that up).

Ecofeminism is not dead!

We would like to thank ZHRØ for their song,

References in the episode:

1) Ecofeminism and Climate Justice. Interview with Greta Gaard.

2) Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.

3) Mind your Buffalo by Buffalo Intellectual.

4) #OilYouNeed on Nutrition and Flavour with Swetha Sivakumar.

Note: Please send us a message if you would like to read the paper!

We're back! It has been a while (here's hoping we stop saying this as often as we do) since we released an episode, and this is one we've wanted to record for so long now. We started this podcast in 2020 after completing our first year in university. Unsettled and fatigued as we were, the world of academia enticed and captivated us in unimaginable ways. Chasing belongingness in an unfamiliar academic world meant adapting to it and becoming 'academics' without ever truly knowing what that meant, a process augmented by an unfiltered (perhaps naive) desire for knowledge. However, a lot has happened in the years that have passed - for one, we have graduated. The charm and glamour long gone, it only feels right to turn our eyes to academia as an institution and examine it for what it is, and what it promises it be. In this episode, we talk about where we started and where we're going, expectations and reality, academic jargon and "canonism", privilege, power, postcoloniality, hermeneutical injustice and self-reflexive negations.

Here is a list of references made in the discussion (feel free to point out anything we have missed!):

1) Like a Savarna, by Ravikant Kisana

2) Hermeneutical Injustice, by Miranda Fricker

3) Paolo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed

4) Walter Benjamin - Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

5) Chat Deni Maar Deli (for funsies)

We Might Be Tables now has a voice note feature! We'd love it if you left us a comment with your thoughts on the episode; click the link below to record a message.

Deep within a dilapidated building hidden away in a dark alley, one Saul Tenser lies in his LifeFormWare bed anticipating the growth of something new in his body. This growth, a new organ, does not come as a surprise to Tenser or his performance partner Caprice. Mutations and transformations of this kind have been around for a while in this seemingly drab world. But are these "inner beauties" anomalies, or an evolutionary gift? 

In this episode, we talk about Crimes of the Future, a body horror film directed by one of the principal originators of the genre. We present our critiques of the film, ask questions about human evolution and sexual desire, draw comparisons with the original Crimes of Future, and dive deeper into the social commentary of the film. Watch this film and share your thoughts about it with us! 

Mentioned in this episode:

Crimes of the Future - David Cronenberg

Not mentioned in this episode but worth checking out:

Why The Human Body Sucks, and How To Fix It (AsapSCIENCE)

Hello! A lot has changed since we recorded our previous episode a year ago, but our desire to be here voicing our thoughts has remained.

In this episode, we talk about where we've been, our thoughts on the podcast, changing attitudes and more, all while going on a few characteristic WMBT Tangents™.

We're glad to be here and to you have you here with us. Thank you and we'll see you around.

P.S. The audio in this episode is from a YouTube video with the same title, which is why it might not be of the best quality. You can click here to watch the video, or find it directly on our YouTube channel.

This episode contains heavy and lengthy discussions about death, suicide, ageing, euthanasia, and disease. Please listen at your own discretion.

In this episode, we explore the idea of dignity in death and sharing the burden of pain as we grow older.

Welcome, my child. 

In our last episode, we began to traverse the deep waters of The Talos Principle. Today, we scuba dive in and explore the many terminal messages scattered across the land. From a dad’s message for #@3##@ to questions about liberty and quality of life, these messages tug at your heartstrings as well as your brain-strings (?).

Here’s a taste of some of the questions that emerge in our discussion: would a true AI deserve citizenship? What about rights? If you had to, how would you make someone believe you were a real person? If these questions make you scratch your chin, we think you will enjoy this episode. 

Also, we cannot say this enough: play the game and show support for games and media like The Talos Principle!

Have fun!

And remember, don’t climb the tower.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Watch the trailer for the game here.

If you're not big into gaming, you can check out a walkthrough of The Talos Principle here.

Thank you Migfus20 on freesound.org for the music in this episode!

In the beginning were the words. And the words made the world.

The Talos Principle, indie game development studio Croteam's first venture into the world of puzzle platforming, is a story for the ages. Anything we say here or in our discussion is unlikely to do full justice to its beauty, so we will keep it short.

Dealing with inexplicably profound themes, including free will, artificial intelligence, sentience, god, religion, and existentialism, The Talos Principle is a dive into the incredible power of interactive storytelling and smooth gameplay. In it, you play as an artificially-intelligent robot who is forced to traverse a world of increasingly-difficult and dangerous puzzles, while continually being met with obstacles that not only hinder progress, but also shake the foundations of your understanding of self and identity.

Do yourself a favour and play this game. It is just the second of many we hope to cover on We Might Be Tables, and it checks all the right boxes.

As always, let us know what you thought of our discussion! We love hearing from you.

Watch the trailer for the game here.

If you're not big into gaming, you can check out a walkthrough of The Talos Principle here.

Music in the episode

"The only people who claim to be apolitical are the ones who experience unearned and unrecognized power from privileged identities (e.g., whiteness, maleness). These people are not forced to confront the politics of their identity because society mirrors the life they are living and the values they hold." - Kate, blackfeministthoughts.wordpress.com.

If everyone is a product of their cultural (and genetic) environments, is it ever possible to behave in ways that are not congruous with the views they have been told to value? Even if we do not consciously act on our convictions at all times, are we inherently "political" beings? Parallelly, is it possible to be apolitical?

We often hear people say things like, "Don't bring politics into this", or "I'm apolitical". An interest in party politics is conflated with participation in political life, which is a fallacy of the highest order. Whether one's interest in "the political" lies merely in theory, or whether it extends to praxis, the claim of being apolitical is nothing but a masked privilege: the privilege of having the normative worldview agree with one's personal worldview.

In this episode, we talk about nearly a dozen different short articles--ranging from Oxford Politics blogs to obscure Reddit threads--in an attempt to qualify politics and the political, as well as question what it means to be disengaged from either of those, i.e., being apolitical.

We believe that this episode is particularly relevant to contemporary times, so there are several things we might have missed in the course of our conversation. Let us know through DM, email, or whatever platform works for you, what you thought of the episode and the articles discussed! Feel free to poke holes or patch wounds in our arguments: after all, we were not apolitical while recording this episode.

Mentioned in the episode:

What is the political, and why should we care? 

Reddit CMV: Being "apolitical" is intellectual laziness and not a trait to be proud of 

Reddit CMV: There is no such thing as apolitical 

Reddit CMV: There's such a thing as being apolitical

Being "apolitical" is a PRIVILEGE

Being Apolitical is an Illusion

Please Stop Being Apolitical It's Not Helping 

The Politics of Being Apolitical 

Why Being Apolitical Can No Longer Just Be A "Choice" 

The Costs of Being Apolitical