Joshua Wimmer ([email protected])
Mon, 26 Oct 1998 15:14:21 -0600
I just finished "Idoru" by William Gibson a week or so ago. Now, there's
already a U2 connection there, because one of the characters, a rock
star, is obviously somewhat inspired by Bono. Read the book; you'll see.
But then I was paging through Flanagan's "U2 At the End of the World"
and I noticed something...
*
>From "Idoru" (some of the characters are visiting a club called the
Western World in Tokyo):
The Western World occupied the top two floors of an office building
that hadn't quite survived the quake...
Laney, glancing down as they passed one of the glowing loops,
noticed, on the treads of the stairs, hardened trickles of something
that resembled greenish amber. "There's stuff on the stairs," he said.
"Urine," Arleigh said.
"Urine?"...
"The plumbing didn't work after the quake," she said. "They couldn't
use the toilets. People just started going, down the stairs. Pretty
horrible, by all accounts, although some people actually get nostalgic
about it."
(from Chapter 23)
*
And from "U2 At the End of the World" (the band is finishing the Zoo TV
tour in Tokyo):
At 5 a.m. we are tramping the back alleys with nothing to guide us
but the name of an after-after hours club that was given to us by Mick
Jones of B.A.D. We follow the instructions of stray pipe-heads and
whoremasters and finally come to the payoff. The club sits on the fifth
floor of a sort of decayed office building that appears to be made of
stucco. To get to the barroom we've got to climb a staircase that cuts
back and forth up the outside of the building. We start trudging,
pulling our coats tight against the freezing December wind and wondering
what this waterfall we're walking against is made of. It's not water -
it seems to be beer, running down the steps around our shoes as we haul
ourselves up to the second landing, the third landing, the fourth
landing - ascending against the current.
When we get to the fifth floor, where the club is, the flood has not
abated, so we stick our heads around to the sixth floor landing and are
more than a little appalled to see that it was not beer we had just
waded through, but urine. The men's room is overflowing and the drunken
patrons are hanging out their snorkels and pissing down the stairs."
*
Mildly interesting, I thought. Could Gibson have been inspired by
Flanagan's account - Gibson has hung out with U2 (Bono and Edge, at
least) before - or is this just kind of common practice in Japan?
Josh
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