on the dude's shirt: INTEGRITY

This weekend was great. hung out with old friends back in town for a time, then hung with ritz and the crew in the buya. I fell in love with a beautiful scientist and got a bloodied nose from a deathmetal gig melee. deep in a tokyo metal dungeon; full body dragon tats; blood-red light; extreme volume; a heaving mass of bodies; in the centre forms a clear circle; combatants enter, clash and part, rejoin the seething mass; at moments the tension erupts; fists glimpsed in a flash of strobe; rage and joy and a forest of rock horns raised to the gods of thunder

"the dead shall rise and feast on the living"

Saw this film “The Village” by M. Night Shyalaman. Liked it. Not too long. Who names their child ‘Night’? Did they plan for him to become a creepy supernatural/suspense film director? Ron Howard’s daughter, a beautiful blind girl. Whenever I see Adrian Brody I can’t help but think of my old mate Mike B. who resembles Brody and the story of when Mike came out of a theatre in Tokyo after watching “The Pianist” and some Japanese people stared and whispered that ‘it was him!’ The Village operates in the tradition of the ‘closed world’ tale: the controlled environment, the sterile construction, the Brecht/Beckett stage, the auteur as scientist; the setting a laboratory, the characters, pale pink-eyed rats who wouldn’t survive a moment in the outside; or moving gears and cogs, balls rolling around a machine in controlled patterns, electrons shooting around a network; diodes, transistors, silicon circuitry. In these type of constructions, a ‘working machine’ means that everything falls in its correct place, that nothing wanders off track, that the finely tuned laws of this constricted and discrete system work as a harmonic and consistent whole, precise, relentless, inevitable, crystalline, eternal. Utopia. This is what they strive for: the sense of the eternal. Of myth (not of legend) – of an elevation of the mundane into the symbolic realm (that heavenly realm of Plato’s fantasies) where Spinoza and Jung meet and talk over english tea in a lucid dream, centuries apart, even now. I love these kind of constructions – but they are a hard trick to pull off. My own writing attempts tend towards them at times. They are often moral realms: realms of moral exploration and elucidation. They carry that religious/mythical tone. Lars Von Trier’s works skirt this kind of construction but somehow in them the auteur is so strong a presence that he ‘corrupts’ the entire universe and pollutes it with his presence and his own impurities. His worlds have some hole torn in them where he leaks in and sickens the very characters gently cupped in his giant directors hands. A friend of mine once said that Mishima’s works ‘stink of blood’…somehow Von Trier’s stink of pestilence, of fevered sweat, of semen. Closed worlds: Murakami’s books are great ones for this. In his the auteur enters as an overwhelmingly positive aura. As a sense of simple wonderment at the weirdness not of life or the universe, but of existence itself (it? it?) In “Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World” the closed-off world/text/novel/creation/universe/mind/idea is a partitioned section of a man’s brain, in which he is ‘trapped’ by a security system wired into his head. He is cut off, adrift, severed from the real and left floating in a discrete world with precise boundaries, rules, cirlces; limits. God I love these works. Its all about cirlces: limits.

I live within the circle of the great train line that rings the city. It sets a boundary within which is one place, and without is another. It is important to me that I live within this. The idea of ‘beyond’ brings a sense of weightlessness, of endlessness – exposure to the horizon, the eater of edges – as though if I were to step outside it, I would no longer know where my world ends, and no longer know when I should stop walking and turn back home. As though I might fall away, to the mountains and beyond, no place to rest my feet on solid ground, no place to rest my head and say ‘I am here. I am withing the circle. The circle protects me, it gives shape and form to my world, it allows me to function in a systematic, understandable environment. It is a bulwark against the madness of the infinite.’

And this is what boundaries are: like walls of houses. Keeping us safe from the hungry infinite.

When I make music, or paint or draw, or write – I need limits. Rules, edges, lines of resistance. This is how all creation works. Take for example, a blank document in Illustrator. A blank white page of glowing gamma radiation pouring from energized liquid crystals in a matrix pattern on the screen. They just POUR out their own ‘being’. It is when we put limits on this stuff, this light/energy/exsitence, that patterns and forms emerge, that shape is given to the endless white plain. Such is the world itself: an infinite field of all things, limited and bracketed by rules. Rules that create something from nothing, rules that themselves ARE nothing (for what is a rule?) I used to love the old Russian Formalist poets and their penchant for setting strict rules to aid in creation: write a poem with no adjectives; write a poem without the letter ‘e’; write a poem while screaming obscenties at train commuters in rush hour; write a poem while fucking your wife; write a poem while you kill a man.