I hear him before I see him. I am standing in a terrifyingly long antechamber in the Union, with a brown wooden table extending from one end to the other. “Jump in my car, I wanna take you home” travels down the corridor in gruff tones, before he has even reached the door.

‘He’s coming’, I think. ‘Oh god, I am about to meet The Hoff’. And suddenly he’s in the room, all 6ft 4 of him, and he’s raring to go. “Alright guys, let’s get it on, let’s do this” he projects as he shakes hands and hears names, and asks me twice what Cherwell is.

“The independent student newspaper at Oxford,” I reply. My voice comes out lower and smoother; I am subconsciously trying to sound as together as him. “I’m fine with my coat on so let’s go,” he says, dismissing the small flurry behind him. He asks me where I want him to sit, and then whistles away as he lowers himself into, of course, the seat at the head of the table. He looks immaculate. Dressed in a dogtooth patterned jacket, with an open black shirt and pristine hair, he is exactly the vision of immortality I had envisioned. The gravitas was shed a little, later, when he was to reveal the inside of his jacket. His own face peered out, with curved writing which read ‘Don’t Hassle the Hoff.’ A commitment to the cause.

For indeed, although I met the Hoff, although I was able to sit extraordinarily close to the very large man, and watch as his strangely bright eyes flashed left and right and piercingly at me, he was almost always the Hoff. He was always the slick façade. He spoke easily, with inflection, and comfort, but all with a practised, rehearsed air.

Currently Hasselhoff is starring in a touring musical which you might have seen advertised on George Street: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. Hasselhoff depicts it as “an adult panto,” and certainly it sounds every inch ridiculous, amusing, and predictably Hoff-like. There is an implicit acknowledgement of the power he has. He narrates, “we had to let the audience take over because we had no choice”, before declaiming that “it’s great, we are excited about it – we love the audience participation.” He seems hesitant to speak ill of the audience’s involvement in any way, clarifying and repeating his love for it. Unsurprising, really, when the value of the Hoff is so much an accolade to his fans, and their relationship with his self-parodic presentation.

I query whether being onstage is more detrimental to the performance when the audience is undoubtedly full of rather loudly excited fans. “It’s overwhelming,” he agrees, “and distracting, but we always turn it into gold”. Since the run of Last Night a DJ Saved my Life began in October, he says that “there’s only been a couple of stupid comments.” He describes his resilient internal monologue each time someone makes a ‘stupid’ comment. “In my head I go ‘Shall I nail this guy?’, because I’ve got stupid comebacks in my head that are good, or shall I just go on?” Usually, he “just go[es] on.”

Predictably, the audience has mainly consisted of women. But he notes that “a surprising number of men from the Knight Rider days come in.” There was one guy that came to see the show that he recalls with particular fondness. “You find these guys all singing along, even the big hitters. I got a guy who flew in in his own helicopter”; he suddenly laughs, a loud singular ‘HA’. “He’s a data processor, he’s just very rich and very cool and he brought his buddies all over and they had a bunch of drinks and they were just singing along”. There seemed to be a little bit of the Hoff in this data processor, and Hasselhoff laughs again with almost fondness in recalling a rich buddy drinking singing along to him.

The whole interview is punctuated with instantaneous automated laughs following any joke or anecdote. He smiles and returns to his barking tone – “and this is really what it is, it’s a singalong musical”. The musical sounds grossly corny, and Hasselhoff acknowledges this before suddenly quoting the musical, singing “look into my eyes”. I do exactly that, but his eyes flitter, uncreased, observing the room.

He suddenly remembers a mistake. The seemingly infallible Hoff, I learn, makes mistakes. In this corny singalong musical, it turns out that there are sporadic and unexplained references to Baywatch. A couple of nights ago he explains, “I forgot the – I forgot the lyrics…to the Baywatch theme song”. His tone changes and incredulous disbelief spills through. Suddenly he is singing again, “So people stand in the darkness”, describing how onstage at this point he stopped and exclaimed, “Whuh”. His faithful audience carried the line on for him, singing, “Afraid to step into the light”. He chortles again. Whenever Hasselhoff mentions lyrics he sings them, in his tuneful shout-singing twang which I cannot describe in fewer words. It’s pleasant and a little scary. I do not think the Hoff is actually capable of singing softly. I’m not so sure he would want to either.

He carries on, “Frankly we thought we were going to get killed in the ratings because I’ve done […] Broadway, I’ve done Chicago on the West End”. He begins to sound more serious. “And I’ve done The Producers with Mel Brooks and I’m very honoured to say I’ve done that, that’s pretty heavy company, Mel Brooks, to be working for him.” He describes Jekyll and Hyde on Broadway as “intensely difficult and very anxious, scary, great”. There is a great, sincere respect in his voice for Brooks. But then he flips back to the tomfoolery of the present – “Stage is a safe place; you know what is in front of you, you know who’s to the back of you. Even though I fell through the stage the other night.”

“How!?”, I cannot help but punctuate this casual comment. “I almost did it again!” he says whilst laughing. It turns out it was less falling through the stage than off the stage. His fallibility increases. In a scene where he had sunglasses on for what he aptly describes as “this Baywatch thing,” and as he turns around and sings “some people stand in the darkness,” (he’s singing to me again), he decides that the audience are too “laid back.” Hasselhoff comments, “I wanted to wake them up, and there was a gap between the stage and the speakers about this big” (he mimes wildly and widely with his large, tanned arms) “and we put a line there but I had my glasses on and I totally forgot about it and BAM – I went all the way through.”

Of course he gets up and continues just the same, but he notes that it’s another hit to “the same knee I’ve been nursing for a while”. He brushes off the sombre acknowledgement of his age with an “anyway,” wrapping up his comments on the show with a placid comment about it all being “fun”.

I want some real David, I decide. Let’s get to the gritty stuff. The Press Officer mimes for me to wrap up. “I want to ask you some questions that you’re not going to be normally asked,” I announce. “I want to talk about things that are David Hasselhoff rather than the Hoff, so I’m going to ask some regular boring questions.” “Just the one question!” the Press Officer interrupts. Right.

I smile at Hasselhoff, who raises an eyebrow. I raise one of mine back, and ask what he had for breakfast this morning. “What did I have? I had –“. He stops, puzzled. “Wow, this morning I actually didn’t have breakfast.” Have I cracked the real David? He no longer soars, rehearsed, through the air. “Um, I didn’t have breakfast, I had coffee.” He darts into an explanation of why he could’ve possibly missed breakfast. “I was up until 4:30am watching American football and I slept through breakfast so I went on until lunch,” he laughs, as if astonished by his own craziness. “So, I, um, started with lunch at – wait, what did we do at 11 o’clock? Something at 11.”

He furrows his brow, unable to detail what he did at 11 o’clock. However, lunch, he reassures me, he did eat eventually – “pasta carbonara and a salmon,” if anyone was wondering. “It was American football play-offs” he justifies again. “That’s fair enough”, I falsely reassure him, as if I had at some point done the same. And with that he’s swept away, murmuring, “What did I do at 11 o’clock? Something happened at 11 – what happened?” He stands for a moment – and then grins, “Oh I know, I had a really great massage” and then he chuckles one last time, and I join in. I sit, and he stands, and we chuckle. And then he says, “Thanks, cheers!” and he’s off. And I leave, certain of having met the Hoff, but uncertain of much else.

Dr Charles Foster is many creatures; a teacher of medical law, a qualified vet, a legal philosopher and a practising barrister. He is also a fox, a badger, a deer, an otter and a swift.

That’s right: for the last 15 years, Foster has spent extended periods of time living as an animal. He has lived in a sett, eaten out of bins, slept under bushes. Perhaps if he were poor, or lacked the eloquence honed by years at the bar, he might be considered mad; as it is, his recently released book on his experiences, Being a Beast, is receiving rapturous reviews.

I meet him in an attempt to understand what drives a respected Oxford tutor to spend weeks living in a hole, eating worms. He is warm and self-deprecating, and extraordinarily earnest. “I was concerned that none of my relationships were real, that I was perpetually at crossed purposes with all the worlds of people who I regarded as my best friends and my family,” he tells me.

“I wanted some sort of reassurance that it was possible to know the other, and one way of testing that is to see if it’s possible to have a relationship with a member of another species. If it’s possible to have a relationship with a member of another species then perhaps there are grounds to be assured that I know my wife or my children or my best friends.”

In its current form, this is a highly philosophical project building on his academic work on identity and human dignity. In a different sense, though, this is something Foster has been working on his entire life. I ask him when he started being an animal. “I think I started probably as soon as I emerged from the uterus. Children crawl around pretending to be lions and tigers; children go to bed every night with a cuddly teddy bear, a member of another species. We don’t think that’s odd; we think it’s human normality, so human children recognise this basic Darwinian fact of our relationship with other species. As soon as we grow up, we grow out of that knowledge, disastrously.”

By his own admission, Foster did grow up disastrously. There is a measure of regret in his voice as he describes his life before becoming a beast. After training as a vet and a lawyer, Foster emerged as “a proud, arrogant, swashbuckling, hunting barrister. I used to get the train north to Fort William every autumn to stalk in very nice lodges. Field sports were a big part of my life. Looking back on it I think that probably was – at a level which I didn’t acknowledge at the time – a quest for intimacy with the natural world. But it took a really perverted form. Do you really establish a relationship with something by going out and trying to kill it? That itself is a psychopathic state of mind.

“Since I was a child I’ve been a passionate naturalist; I’ve always marinated myself in the natural world and I’ve always at some level been aware that I needed it. But I never seriously countenanced the possibility of a two-way, of a reciprocal relationship with it, until I – as I rather histrionically put it in the book – put down my guns and took up my tofu.

“We’re not talking about a Damascus Road conversion here; we’re talking about a gradual evolution away from predatorhood towards – not victimhood, but towards acknowledging that an essential part of my self-description is ecological.”

For Foster, an important component of this exercise is revealing the animal within each of us. “The title of the book, Being a Beast, is deliberately ambiguous. It could and in most people’s eyes at first blush does say, ‘This is a project in which I go out and try to transform myself into a beast.’ But the better way of understanding it is something like, ‘Being a beast, I picked up a cup of espresso macchiato [we are talking over coffee] and drank it in a beastly sort of way.’

“So, I would like to think that the book is trite, that it is simply saying in a poetical and exploratory way what Darwin told us all 150 years ago. So the best possible reception for this book, as far as I’m concerned, will be for people to shrug and say, ‘Yeah, obviously. Tell us something new,’ and to acknowledge in themselves that this was so obvious as not to need saying.”

I sense a considerable level of concern over how the book is received. Foster’s is a story that is all too easy to sensationalise; a review of his book in The Guardian describes him simply as “the man who ate worms like a badger.” Foster wants to stress that it is about more than this. “It’s actually not very interesting to have a description of what worms taste like. If you want to know what worms taste like, the best way of doing it is to go into your back garden and eat some, rather than have Charles Foster tell you what they taste like. All that tells you really is what suite of adjectives Charles Foster has about his palate.” This is a project is about empathy, understanding and self-recognition, but I’m too curious not to ask about the practicalities of becoming a beast. A trained vet, Foster found out all there was to know about the physiology of the animals he was to imitate, but it was the simple steps that made the greatest difference. “One way of doing this is to unwind the few million years of evolution in which I have been a biped by simply dropping six feet to the ground. Six feet – a couple of million years. That physical act makes you necessarily a less visual animal, because there’s not so much to see down there, because there’s often grass up to and above your eye level.

“There are various ways of reconditioning your nose to make you a more olfactory animal, so I describe in the book how before I went into the woods I tried to rekindle my nose, so I would burn joss sticks of various sorts in different rooms of the house, blindfold myself and try to navigate myself around the house by the smell. I’d put different types of cheese in each corner of the room and after disorientating myself, try to orientate myself by reference to the cheese. And it is interesting how effective those things are. Human noses are actually surprisingly good.

“When I was being a badger, it was about eyelevel olfaction, trying to learn a scent landscape, learning how the tides of scent shift up and down the valley, learning how scent oozes from the ground as the sun hits it, learning how smell bounces like an echo off the walls of the valley, trying not to translate everything that I received through my nose into a visual metaphor. And that’s a really difficult exercise, because my tendency as a visual animal is to sniff something and then imagine to myself what it would look like, but again with practice you can say to yourself, ‘that is more the smell than it is the sight of it, or at least as much the smell as the sight of it,’ so you become a more sensorially holistic mammal.”

These last comments remind me of twentieth century philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal article, What is it like to be a bat? in which he famously argues that we cannot escape our subjective perspective; the mind of a bat is tantalisingly alien to us. Foster is resigned to this limitation, but optimistic about what we can achieve in spite of our human-ness. “I was always Charles Foster the agonised Oxford don crawling around in a wood – I wasn’t a badger. But I was an agonised Oxford don crawling around in a wood who recognised to a greater extent than he recognised before that it’s a mere 30 million years since I shared a common ancestor with a badger, which is nothing. And that sort of kinship is not only possible, but vital.”

On this day last week, I went to Freud, the bar in Jericho. This is relevant to the cultural-historical concerns of this column because ‘Freud’ also refers to the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud was a historical figure, and like Freud’s historic work, my trip to ‘Freud’ is also a regrettable entry into a long catalogue of awkward social history. In a further parallel, ‘Freud’ the bar, much like Freud’s work, has a great deal to say about culture and what it reveals about the social and psychological structures implicit in our collective enterprises.

‘Cat and Cucumber’ – sounds like one of those abstract but oddly figurative conjunctions that comprise the title of a provincial Wetherspoon’s. Like Wetherspoon’s, beneath the veneer of innocuous blandness there lies a more sinister reality. There is indeed a highly sinister subtext to the social and psychological phenomenon that is the success of cats being filmed in the presence of cucumbers. In diagnosing this symptomal point in our contemporary social existence, the joint historical-cultural interests of Freud the person and ‘Freud’ the bar, come together with all the probability of a successful hook-up over a Wetherspoon’s Thursday ‘curry club’.

In said videos, an unsuspecting cat is framed in the quotidian mise en scène of a family kitchen. The kitchen in its function of corporate nourishment is naturally the stage for the expression of Oedipal transactions. Indeed the ingestion of produce from the mother and father has a clear resonance with the intermingling of familial fluids that the paternal law prohibits (with the slowness of the staff at the cocktail bar, you all know why no fluids ever get mingled.)

In the face of this dramatic Oedipal encounter between the prohibition of the symbolic law and the sexual real that is expressed in the act of eating, the table becomes a veritable Greek tragedy (the Euripidean catharsis of finding a table having finally ordered a drink is poetic, I tell you). The poor cat becomes the Oedipus of modern times. Presented with an obscenely phallic cucumber, the feline cat jumps at the perverse presence of this erect grocery. The torture of the cat via the cucumber is a way for the YouTube savvy family to cathartically enact the repulsion and desire within the nuclear dynamic – on the cat. I won’t tell you how that relates to my trip to Freud…

Johnnie Walker set his glass down on the desk and looked straight at Nakata. He chuckled. “Listen – I’m not killing cats just for the fun of it. I’m not so disturbed I find it amusing,” he went on. “I’m not just some dilettante with time on his hands. It takes a lot of time and effort to gather and kill this many cats. I’m killing them to collect their souls.”

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore has many Marmite passages that readers will either love or hate – not least the scene where a live incarnation of whiskey mascot Johnnie Walker explains to the protagonist why he has been killing cats and eating their hearts (it’s to build a flute with which to destroy the universe, obviously). In other scenes, mackerel rain from the sky between discussions on the nature of God. If one gets beyond an initial gut reaction to reject it as pretension, though, what emerges is a thoughtful blend of pop philosophy, postmodern uncertainty and weird, intriguing scenes like that one. Paradoxically, Murakami is often held up in the West as a very ‘other’ author, yet faces criticism in Japan for being un-Japanese, and for a book that ought to be incredibly offputting and inaccessible, it’s very readable. Published in 2002 in Japanese with an English translation in 2005, it won critical acclaim from John Updike and a spot on The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2005. The light tone of Jay Rubin’s translation helps keep the various odd tableaux moving by quickly. Even without finding any meaning in the plot – and the novel offers nothing willingly – any fans of talking felines will enjoy Kafka on the Shore. The book’s list of characters on Wikipedia has two sections: one entitled ‘Humans’, the other ‘Cats’.

So people think I watch porn. Being into anime must have been much cooler in the 90s. Cowboy Bebop was busting its moves as an instant-classic cross between Butch Cassidy and Battlestar Galactica. Miyazaki’s career was well-established; every kid wished their neighbour was Totoro. When you want to talk anime, this ‘golden era’ is your go-to. It has little to do with how horrible the industry looks, and makes its fans look, today.

Trying to get ‘into’ anime, absorbed in both classic shows and the new ones airing every season, is a game of blindfolded Minesweeper. It’s easy to get recommended big-shots like Attack on Titan, Full-metal Alchemist and Death Note, but what if you want to explore on your own? It won’t be long before you hit an ‘ecchi’ or ‘harem’ show full of oversized breasts and the things they grow from which you couldn’t call ‘women’ for fear of off ending the gender worldwide. It’s the industry’s view of the Japanese male target market, and it sells, and it helps to sell all kinds of other media. Watch the first episode of Naruto and be treated to a 12-year-old Ninja transforming into a naked woman to give his teacher a nosebleed. Apparently this show is popular.

It’s no surprise that nowadays, when you tell people how much you love big-eyed cartoons, you get those odd looks, maybe some giggles, and that one guy who says: “You do mean hentai, right?”

Japan is a far cry from Western culture, where we’ve fought to Free the Nipple and Lisa Simpson doesn’t have a shower scene every episode. Only in 2014 did they finally ban child pornography, albeit with the exception of explicit images of children in anime and manga, which largely defeats the point. Fanbased ‘doujin’ circles continue to scrawl out the vilest pre-pubescent situations, perhaps with slave-girls who look like cats and meow for their masters, or have superpowers that destroy their clothes , in order to satisfy whatever obsession their friends and fans are dying for. Even Nintendo’s squid-shooter Splatoon broke Rule 34 of the internet before it was released. Don’t Google that.

You can buy mousepads for resting your wrists on your anime crush’s carriage, and skimpy figurines for hundreds of thousands of yen. Most day-time variety shows feature a horde of girls at the back of the stage. Most magazine covers feature an innocent girl, real or cartoon, in some kind of attention-grabbing swimwear.

In this atmosphere, the more research one does, the more the anime fanatic that recommends you Angel Beats! and Shirobako, knowing you want as little big-chested ‘fan-service’ as possible, regardless looks like a paedophile. Who would be encouraged to join your fandom? Male audiences shouldn’t stand the feeling of being targeted and encouraged to revel in perversions. Female audiences should never stand for the objectifi cation many trends in anime and manga bring. It becomes hard to see the merit when some material goes against the grain, or takes a stab at it. To fully appreciate Ryuko’s loss of shame at her skimpy outfit in Kill la Kill, you have to be steeped in the ‘ecchi’ tradition and its flaws. Hibiki Yoshizaki’s cult music video to Teddyloid’s thumping ‘Me!Me!Me!’ would likewise make little sense without that experience. One only has to watch YouTube reaction videos of anime newcomers, confused at the great significance of naked girls vomiting down the lonely shut-in’s throat or firing lasers at him from their breasts.

But I am not ashamed of these things. Japan has a wealth of incredible art invested in its animated media, and the more it gets its act together, the more innocence can look like innocence, and sexualisation like powerful statements rather than eye-candy for the salacious soul. Miyazaki himself, with over 95 per cent of Japan having watched his films, threw down the gauntlet with Spirited Away’s subtle but certain attack against the country’s child prostitution industry. Children didn’t need to think about that, but his critics could lap it up. Though finding it can sometimes be more cat-and-mouse than one would like, there’s no absence of modern material like this. The current season’s smash-hit, Erased, takes us through the quest of a man thrown back in time to his schoolboy days to save many futures from death at the hands of a child-killer, and the theme of child abuse runs heartrendingly through each installment. Through stories like these that challenge the country’s thinking, animators, directors and writers have the potential to undo the knot that Japan’s perverted media has tied it in.

But would it make enough money? Japan has facilitated the lifestyle of the anime obsessed ‘otaku’, the shut-in ‘hikikomori’, to the point that at least a million citizens are estimated to live glued to screens, never to leave their rooms, fi lled like treasure troves with vast anime and manga collections. They are, tragically, the foundation of the animator’s pay-check. Is there any way to reach a target market who have shut themselves away from civilisation? If oversized breasts and glimpses of underwear are what they crave, how is the respectable male anime fan going to set himself apart and persuade others that his lifestyle does not need a regular Kleenex supply? We need to tear apart the culture surrounding Japanese cartoons, and build in its place something every fan can feel proud of.

But first, we would have to sink our claws into the country’s lack of respect for women. Never has more than ten per cent of the Diet been female. But women shouldn’t need more of a voice to get men to open their eyes and see the objectification of their media. We need to tell ourselves – we need to keep telling ourselves – that the future does not lie in the prostitution of our potential.

★★★★☆

Best known for their previous album Rhine Gold, which was used as the soundtrack for hit TV show The Bridge, Choir of Young Believers’ have released their fifth album, Grasque.

Initially the record seems to include Rihanna-like RnB beats alongside Eno-esque synth transitions. On fifth track ‘Græske’, Jannis Noya Makrigiannis’ vocals take on an ethereal, raga-like chant. Makrigiannis hails from Copenhagen and thought up much of this album on a Swedish farm with producer Aske Zidore. Yet this album is not restricted by landmass.

Instead, the tracks weave a complex web of sound. What should be grimy beats quickly morph into emotive chimes, and a sound that is at one time hauntingly chapel-like rapidly morphs into urban roughness.

With song titles ranging from ‘The Whirlpool Enigma’ to ‘Olimpiyskiy’, Grasque is expansive and all-encompassing. While tracks are not immediately distinguishable from others, the textural development of each alone – particularly ‘Does It Look As If I Care’ and ‘Jeg Ser Dig’ – is astounding. These songs mutate from piano-led smoky jazz to ambient synth work. Makrigiannis’ voice has a sensitivity rare to find in serious male musicians without it taking on a wussy, frail tone.

Hardly an album of party bangers, this record is saturated in complexity and nuance, requiring several listens before you feel you can even begin to grapple with the sound.