captainsblog | Drive My Car. Just Be Careful When Charging It.

Tonight we will finish a 3-hour-long film that is a second watch for Eleanor but a first for me:

Don't let the Japanese characters deter you. There are mandatory subtitles, even curated by font or punctuation for the numerous languages and play-within-a-play moments throughout. It won the 2022 Oscar for best foreign film and was a nominee for best picture, and it deserved both. The car is a left-hand-drive Saab Turbo, unusual to see in Japan (and a detail Eleanor amazingly missed when she first watched this by herself during her first knee recovery a year ago). The driver in the poster is the young woman hired by a Hiroshima theater festival to drive its invited director to and fro during his staging of Uncle Vanya. That director, standing outside the car, is a complex and troubled man who, in the first half hour of the film, experiences infidelity, a tragic death and a crash of that very car (oddly, all things we'd watched the night before starting this in a shorter and even lesser known 2020 film called King of Knives).

In the course of this Japanese film, we probably will have seen, or at least heard, virtually all of the dialog of Chekhov's classic drama. It did make me look for a version of the full play, and boy is there one:

Our library doesn't have it, and streaming appears to require a trial subscription to Yet Another PriceyThing, so I'll probably just buy the DVD and donate it to our system.

Before meeting this film's lot doing Vanya, we get a quick first taste of the Drive My Car lead actor's directing methods, as we briefly see him preparing for and then performing in Waiting for Godot. This one I've seen, and studied, and so when it looked very typical, I knew and explained to Eleanor why: the playwright's estate is extremely controlling of its performance rights, and they forbid any deviation from the script or the stage directions and will cease-and-desist any performance that tries to. It does not go public domain until 2059, but I bet that's already on some artistic directors' calendars. Yusuke, the director, has figured out perhaps the only permitted way around that restriction: Vladimir speaks his lines in Japanese, while Estragon's are in Indonesian. Vanya brings an even bigger borgaschmord of language to the table read, as English, Tagalog, Mandarin and even Korean Sign Language are among the many more that all join together. (During the table read scenes, the actors pound the table at the end of each line so the next one up, who probably doesn't speak their language, will know they're done.)

The multi-Asian cast is amazing, the sets and cinematography gorgeous, and the multiple plots and plots within plots will keep you guessing and thinking for the whole time. I suggest staying away from reviews and trivia until you're done, as the 2022 New Yorker retrospective of it already spoiled something we saw, but did not quite understand, in the second hour.

Kafuku’s driver also has quite the story of her own to tell, and I suspect even more of it will come out in the final reel of this film. She, and her passenger, probably spend at least a third of their screen time in that car, yet somehow we’ve never seen them ever stop for gas. That brings things much closer to home, because yesterday I had a weird experience with the Hyundai hybrid that served as quite a cautionary tale for me.

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We are in our sixth year of owning this car, after Eleanor had two previous three-year leases of a Smart electric without a gas tank. This one is perfect for what I do, because charging it off our house current takes about 6-8 hours when we get home and gets us just under 30 miles of local travel without ever touching the gas. For longer trips like mine, the 10 gallon tank gets its total range up over 600 miles. The charging cable can be plugged into any available 110 outlet, but increasingly there are EV charging stations that will do the job a lot faster. They vary a lot in terms of availability, adaptability and especially cost.

As I’ve observed before, Wegmans has two of them, of two different varieties, at two of their four stores in Amherst. The older one was put in by National Grid, and is free to use as long as you have a keytag from one of the older school players in the charging market known as ChargePoint. We’ve had one going back to the Smart electric days. The keytag also works at a number of charging stations inside Rochester parking ramps, which are free to charge with and get you a great spot if they’re not already taken, which days they almost always are. The newer Wegmans one here, as well as one outside their “mothership” in Pittsford, is pricier and, for our car now, useless. Its plug is the two-penis type favored by Tesla, which Elno has apparently convinced Biden to adapt as the national standard for the rollout of expanded EV stations.

Adapters, to allow ours to be plugged into one of these, have been promised, but at the rate the Muskrat is fucking things up, who knows when they’ll show up.

Occasionally, you will find a freebie of an available fast-charge plug without needing any app for a tag to get yourself some juice. The library in our former hometown has one of those, and it’s great when it's available and when it’s not broken. Yesterday, though, I encountered yet another player in this Brave New World of direct charging, and I don’t plan on going back.

It was a Rochester travel day, and on my way in I heard my friend Scott playing a song by a great newish-to-us artist named Allison Russell. We could have booked her into our own local folk music program a few years ago, but she's now at summer outdoor arenas like Darien Lake blowing the lids off the dumps. We have her own albums, but this track, called "Many Mansions," is from an anthology CD called My Black Country - The Songs of Alice Randall.

It homages the influences of Black artists in the genre that the Good Ole Boys took over in the last half of the previous century. The recent crossovers of Rhiannon Giddens (also on this record) and even Beyonce attempt to reclaim that heritage.

As I finished my workday with two late afternoon appointments, I decided to stop at Record Archive to see if they had it. They did not (I found another lovely one from a different artist Scott had also played earlier), but when I got there, I saw a charging station on the wall outside their car park. Our office has just one 110 plug for my use, but someone took the space in front of it for most of my time there and I was down to 3 miles of electric range when I got to the store.

It was a new-to-me station type called EV Connect. The plug was right for the car, but the app to use it wasn't one I had. But hey, the siren sang! Download it then click this QR code or enter the station number!

I'm not stupid enough to follow links direct from codes. I found the actual app in the protected Apple App Store, then manually entered PC2684. A whole dollar for the charge, no matter the duration! Sounded reasonable, so I made the dreaded in-app purchase. After finding no Mansions but coming out with Mitchell!, I unlocked and unplugged and was on my way home.

Traffic hit on the other side of downtown, so I had a chance to check my banking app to make sure the charge- the money charge- had gone through:

I scrolled back through the new app. Yep, a dollar plus tax for the charging- and 20 bucks for the parking?!? Good thing I had a halfway decent balance in there for it to come off; I pity some kid who's living Venmo to Venmo and got charged hundreds in overdraft fees on other purchases because that dollar wasn't a dollar.

There was a toll free number. I called it. He was very happy to assist me. It's supposedly a "hold," like the gas stations sometimes do when you pay at the pump, and will come off in "three to five business days."

Part of the problem is I did the whole deal as a "guest" instead of spending 20 minutes in the sun on a phone keypad setting up an account. That also explained why all the detail in the app disappeared until I set up such an account. He did get an email to me that I can use to confirm or complain. Took him awhile to get the letters, though.

Maybe I should have done it in Korean Sign Language. Or screamed "YELLOW CAR!" at him.