Long Stories Short

A student today, is revealed by chance glimpse of a photo in a notebook, as a friend of a friend who worships the devil across the sea - and this young girl she was born on the sixth of June, and is of an age of thirty-three this year and wants, on the nape of her neck, that unaji of erotic infamy, the numbers

666

tattooed in black ink, irrevocable. She loves skulls, like another girl I know, echoes of the Dia De Los Muertos. Cute, she says: skull-scrawled; skull-clad; skull-spangled.


INTERSTICES

I recall a drunken conversation with a co-worker the week before last; revealed by chance glimpse of twin tattoos on his forearms; black and red – I-ching hexagrams, something and Grace. Snake-Eyes and Storm-Shadow. And so we talked of chances, and creation, and flânerie: his stories of days spent wandering at the whim of a pair of dice and questions posed under influence. Schizing across the city; doing things that one doesn’t want to do, pushing into zones of extreme discomfort. And for what? he asked. And I recall that my father told these same stories, walked these same paths unwalked by any other fore or since, pebbles thrown into the same river. And I too, on acid, across the trackless urban hills, I-Ching in fist, PKD-inspired, following a rabbit down a hole to find/write/be written by my thesis.

IMAGES OF DICE

Dice roll around the edges of everything. When in university, years I spent, reading theories of determinism and free will, and I came to the conclusion that there is no freedom: that all flows from before. Spinozistic (in retrospect), I saw that God and Nature are coterminous. Platonic, that from inside we can know nothing but a distortion and that there is no outside, only the whole. Sartrean, that responsibility comes with such a revelation of human limitation. And from this Humility.

And from this The Avatar.

Dice from games I play. Systems of storytelling. Stories being everything; stories making the world go round.

I told a story the other day, shaking knucklebones in a skull, tossed them on a flat green stone.

Three sixes.

light emitting diodes descending >> river stones on wood << pixels emerging

Went to an exhibition near nippori station last sat. night; “fragile” by Miyajima Tatsuo. Beautiful old building; a restored Sento or public bathhouse from 1787. Miyajima’s works are ‘sculptures’ constructed of red LED counters ticking down at various speeds from 9 to 1 (zero is an emptiness; a darkness.) some are like latticeworks or spiderwebs, hanging delicately from the walls and spangled with crimson fireflies speeding down in time, around and around again cycling forever – some slow like aeons, some a blur of movement. Others are trapped in plastic bubbles suspended in water, floating like digital seacreatures dredged from some infinitely dark depth. Some are inside the windows; the light of the sun or of passing headlights splays ghostlike projections of numbers tumbling down the walls…what stuck me most about these things was that they are always ticking DOWN, but cycle over and over; the effect being a simultaneous sense of both loss and endlessness. I want to see more of his works.

simple electronics; nostalgia; the game of life

This exhibition evoked all sort of memories and associations. Firstly; my nostalgic love of old computer technology. The vic 20 days; the c64; the amiga – these things have entered into a unique aesthetic realm now, infinitely cool and even moving. Miyajima’s sculptures remind me of John Conway’s Game of Life where systems of extreme simplicity give rise to complex, beautiful, and mesmerizing patterns and behavior. My love of the game of I-Go is connected with my discovery of these patterns long years ago. When I first lived in Japan, in Osaka, I lived near the Shinsekai (New World) district and its famous tower the Tsutenkaku (Tower reaching to Heaven.) This area is famous for its gaming dens – the traditional games of Mahjong, Shogi, and I-go, and now more modern pastimes such as pachinko and slot machines. I hung around here for a while, watching the old men play their games, and eventually one Saturday, was invited to join them at a table. I played then every weekend for a few months. These quiet old men with their deeply-lined faces, smoking pipes and chewing strips of dried squid while sipping tea and reading the newspaper in the afternoon sun, eyes roaming over pale wooden boards strewn with white and black river stones – these are treasured memories. Go is a fascinating game, deeply philosophical like that Game of Life; creating beautiful patterns from simple rules. From Wikipedia:

It is commonly said that no game has ever been played twice. This may be true: On a 19×19 board, there are about 3^361×0.012 = 2.1×10^170 possible positions, most of which are the end result of about (120!)^2 = 4.5×10^397 different (no-capture) games, for a total of about 9.3×10^567 games. Allowing captures gives as many as

10^(7.49x10^48)

possible games, all of which last for over 4.1×10^48 moves! (For two comparisons: the number of legal positions in chess is estimated to be between 10^43 and 10^50; and physicists estimate that there are not more than 10^90 protons in the entire visible universe.)

So there are more games of Go than there are protons in the Universe. Somehow I always find this to be a comforting fact. Something I read in Borges, I think a paraphrase of a quotation of a fictious source, springs to mind: “The simplest possible abstraction of the universe is the universe itself.”

Closely related to these things; my love of the works of Benoit Mandelbrot, the Polish-French Mathematician whose books are both rigorously theoretical and exquisitely artistic. Fractals, too, are tiny equations that illustrate Emergence.

Like improvisational Jazz; unpredicted beauty from the confluence of rules and chaos.

Like Noise Music; another reason why I came to this country; waves of shimmering sound at extreme volume produces unique and irreproducible sheens and patterns, melodies and rythyms – objects of beauty captured momentarily from the void, held in the hand for the briefest of spans, marveled at and gasped over – only to disappear instantly back into the Sea of Possiblities, the cosmic background radiation, the afterbirth of the universe, the Hissing Underlying Everything. That's what you see and hear when you detune an analog receiver. That memory of the Universe's beginning.

And like a great game I want to plug: Darwinia by UK company Introversion which has been winning all sorts of awards of late and is the ultimate retro-computer nerd’s (that’s me) nostalgic trip-game. This game, truly, restores my faith in the once-grand potential of the gaming industry to create a new medium for the production of Art and Aesthetica. This is what games SHOULD be.

notes from a teacher training meeting

This is training week, where we are presented with vaulted depictions of lessons hovering in a glittering astral realm of Platonic ideation. During one particularly mind-numbing moment, I was struck by the contrast between the teaching philosophies of contemporary western education; praise, encouragement, positive reinforcement and so on – and a sudden vision of the North Korean police state with its drill-sergeant-perfect synchronization of the human being to a machinelike ordered monster, somehow brutal, remorseless, pathological. Kim standing on a hill surveying his geometrical fields of human crops. Not a shepherd; a harvester. Then suddenly, the idea that Kim and his ilk are bad teachers. That teachers, the lords of their small realms, are by their very nature tiny autocrats; dictators; leaders; visionaries; guides and prophets. As above, so below. A class that collapses into chaos or succumbs to vicious routine or quails in fear of the master’s whipwood cane – these are the small haemorrages of society. I have had terrorist students, who through jealousy or boredom or frustration or simple malice, systematically seek to take apart the nation that I and we have built. Each class has its accountants and its fundamentalists, its sheep and wolves. Who am I here? Caesar or Stalin? Victoria or Ghandi? As the lectures wore on I found my mind wandering even further, to a questioning of a fundamental premise of language teaching – the notion that teaching is a transmission of knowledge. And of course in practice a language is no static datum but rather a fluxious process, a Deleuzian becoming, a way. Reminded of martial arts training – perhaps this is another, less trodden, path? Asian students cannot learn my English – my idioms, my inflections - they must instead gather the tools and skills and experience with which to make their own. And this they do and are doing, Oxford be damned.

shoben yokocho

April each year here
Is like a flashback;
A daemonic memory
Of the ancient times
When I first walked the streets of Shinjuku
And caroused the bars of piss alley.

And these men
These lost men; each with stories
Too long in the telling;
Tattoos deep inked and swelling
With history and blood and emotion
Speak their hearts in cheap izakaya.