black_lance

north by northeast

2008-09-14T20:42:00.004+09:00

taiwan

2008-07-10T23:48:00.008+09:00

golden week

2008-07-10T23:13:00.007+09:00

TEDs

2008-06-03T01:00:00.013+09:00

diversions

2008-05-26T23:55:00.003+09:00

cell phones pictures of plants ehagaki list of fictional music groups metempsychosis the cube moirai pythagoras loup kyberneticka babicka threads: nuclear war clowes dad's cat japan's homeless the internet troll as trickster archetype rifters harry potter is shit uklg interview homo economicus bicameralism epiphanies the eye vv evolution vv singularity shinto electronic musical instruments bohemian grove 2ch futaba E8 the sims wikipod TED zeitgeist dnd flowchart bushlinks m$ church perimeter institute urban ruins metagovernment anonymous against intellectual monopoly against intellectual property tokugawa crest patricia piccinini nadshots motoko ivan bilibin yoshitaka amano illustration artomic ron pippin cyril can der haegen wooster debra hampton nina katchadourian paleofuture thomas briggs the city of woe dollface neal murren billy reynolds future moscow sayaka astounding pierre matter ero guro tsukioka yoshitoshi james gurney cthulhuart space colonies scai luminaut kris kuksi james jean fuckinggoogleit assisted suicide armorgames fellowcraft tetrachromat females technovelgy alive in joburg THE CODEX SERAPHINIANUS pulgasari mars faces hardcore gaming 101 zombism toxoplasma 300 kazzak morgue poincare onmyodo seimei wordie stilted celtic knots john titor snail telegraphy iheartpixels aaron koblin kikkoman five turoks transmetropolitan nietzsche family circus rpg motivational posters garfield is dead korgoth list of problems solved by macguyver synaesthesia

spring

2008-04-29T21:06:00.007+09:00

All Hallows' Eve

2007-10-31T23:48:00.000+09:00

With Fire In The Belly

北夏

2007-08-18T21:57:00.000+09:00

2007-08-06T03:26:00.000+09:00

death

2007-07-31T00:39:00.000+09:00

death

in the snow here i am warm. my blood still white hot gushes from my side over my thighs. oxygen sliding rasp-like under the skin. before me the dark cedars across the lake the trace of my solitary prints fast fading. the trees creak in the cold northerly the dogs barking on my crimson trail. a limb from a drowning tree presses into my back. holding my attention. like a page. i lay like a broken brush not quite in the centre, my hair blood-soaked and drawn across by the wind, streaked, tapering

soon to be scattered in flames
disintegrating in the summer blue lake
a cold corpse frozen in wait
gushing hot blood
ink
honey

the sweetness soon follows the cold. the dogs, pincer-like, as i float on the surface tension, revolve couterclockwise

how he stands above me. the boy. his sword is clean white gleaming in the snow. the forge line i know like the skin of my palm. gripping the hilt. his fresh iron blood lighting iceblue eyes as he raises with two fists

brown and white volcanic water
the smooth neck of my first wife
wet hair on my forehead
spots of snow,
regret,

sky

oz

2007-05-22T23:47:00.000+09:00

日記

2007-05-14T11:18:00.000+09:00

Suzuki-sensei set me homework during my two week trip to Australia: a diary. The machine translation which follows the original text here is by far the more interesting of the two. Flowchart: Writing --> Babelfish --> Better Writing. No shit.

二目日：古いもの

今日は骨董屋に買い物行った。父さんは常に色んな「骨董品」と言うか、「ジャンク」と言うか物を収集します。彼はEbay でこのごろ売買します。私は　Captain Cook の伝記を買い、古い本屋の裏にある部屋で署名された「チョッパー」と言う有名な Melbourne の殺し屋の自伝的な本を発見しました。それぞれ　3 ドルだった。これらの生命に両方とも同じ価値があることはおかしいだと思いました。

お父さんは真鍮物を大好きです。古い doorknocker、栓抜き、Trench Art　とか。古いビンもよく収集します。　美しさもあるんですが、これらの関係のある話のほうが大切だと思う。父さんは　1 本　の　"Cod's　Tonic Water" と言う怪しい万能薬が持っている。このビンから私達は英語の言葉　'Codswallop' を貰います。

Misaki は古いリングを買った。ガラスの円で赤い薔薇が収監されている。

三目日：GHOSTS

私達は南海岸に運転した。古代森林の深さに。お父さんは数年前、伐採道の端で、失われたゴーストタウンの跡を見つけた。今は秋ですね。この季節に、隠れた物ははっきりされます。ヨーロッパの植民地化の跡は落葉樹のユーカリ森林の灰色っぽい緑と対照した。住居のまぼろし。建物の石造の基礎。野性的になった薔薇のもつれ。

私達は燃えるような　カシ、クリ、Peppercorn、ポプラ、シラカバの木に囲まれたプールの横でピクニックをしました。古い巨大の保護の枝の下で偶然に苗木を育ちましていた人間は一度ここに住んでいた。今、生命の記憶はこの波を渡る奇妙な土地からの持って来た木としかない。

五目日：偶然一致

今日、私達は古い山火事を見張りための木を登った。空に橋を渡って歩いた。そこにから、世界は違っている見る。後で、海の横に小さな村に止まった。Misaki と父さんはトイレに行っていた時、私は道の横に Snottygobble と言う木の下のベンチで座った。突然、砂利で車のブレーキの音を聞こえた。私の高校時代の友達　Mostyn が来た！。彼は５年間ロンドンに住んでいて、一週間だけオーストラリアに来ました。こんな同時発生。。。シュールな不陰気がした。

不必要な言うことんですけれども、私達は直ちに一番近いパブに喋るためにまっすぐに行った。

九目日：殉職石

今日は Freycinet の国立公園でハイキングすることを行った。それは不思議で、独特な場所である。巨大なピンクっぽい茶色の岩で作った　Titan のケルンのような山である。

峡谷を通って3 時間ハイキングした。

白い Ghost-gum の木、やさしい黄色い花があるのミモザの木。太陽で浴びているWallabyとトカゲ。

遠い向かいに、Wineglass　Bay に着いた。息がつけないように綺麗な遠隔の地です。

夕焼けは荘厳だった。空は燃えている石炭のように光った。、血の真っ赤、毒投げ矢のカエルのオレンジ、ギャルの eyeshadow のライラック、中とろのピンク、　オーストラリアの土の繊細な黄土。

その所は現実の世界のように感じた。外側にすべて場所は薄い影だけ。

WORLDLINGO TRANSLATION:

Two eye day: Old ones

Today shopping went in the antique house. The father color is calls “the antique” always, or calls “the junk”, or collects the thing.As for himEbay So it buys and sells recently. As for me　Captain Cook You bought the biography, you signed at the room which to the reverse side of the old bookstore is famous, “chopper”MelbourneThe autobiography book of the hit man was discovered.Respectively　3 It was dollar. Both as for being the same value is strange in these lives, you thought that is.

Brass ones we love the father.It is old　doorknocker Corkscrew,Trench Art　.You collect also the old bottle well.　There is also a beauty, it is, but you think that the story which has these relationships is more important.As for father　1 Book　“Cod's　Tonic Water " The doubtful panacea where with you say has.From this bottle as for us English word　'Codswallop'　You receive.

Misaki The old ring was bought.The red rose commitment is done with circle of the glass.

Three eye day:GHOSTS

We drove to the Nankai bank. In depth of ancient forest. The father several years ago, in the edge of the lumbering road, found the mark of ghost town which is lost. Now fall the shank.In this season, those which hide are clear.The ash of the eucalyptus forest of the deciduous tree seductive green it contrasted the mark of European colony conversion.Vision of house.Stone foundation of building.The entanglement of the rose which becomes wildly.

As for us, [kashi] and the kind of chestnut which burn, “Peppercorn] Picnic was done with side of the pool which is surrounded in the wood of the poplar and the canoe birch.Accidentally the nursery stock you were brought up under the branch of the protection of enormous it is old The human had lived one time here.Now, as for memory of life there is with only a wood which has from the strange land which crosses this wave.

Mixture day: Accidental agreement

Today, we watched old Yamabi thing and climbed the wood of for the sake of.Crossing the bridge the sky, you walked. The empty, the world is different there, you see. Afterwards, on side of the sea it stopped in small village.MisakiWhen with as for the father having gone into the rest room, as for me on side of the road “Snottygobble” With it sat down with Kinosita's bench which is said. Suddenly, sound of the brake of the car it was audible with the gravel.Friend of my high school age　Mostyn Came! . He having lived in 5 annual London, just one week came to Australia. Such syndrome.。。[shiyuru] non- gloomy did.

However the unnecessary thing which says it is, we went in order to at once to talk closest pub straightly.

Nine eye day: Death in harness stone

Today Freycinet Hiking with the national park it did. That being strange, is the unique place.The enormous pink [tsu] [po] it was and made with the rock of brown　Titan It is the mountain like the kernel.

Passing by the gorge 3 Time it hiked.

It is white Ghost-gum The wood, there is an easy yellow flower the wood of the mimosa.It pours with the sunWallabyWith lizard.

In distant opposite side,Wineglass　Bay It arrived.In order for breath not to attach, it is clean remote area.

The evening glow was dignified.The sky shone like the coal which burns.The orange of deep-red of blood and frog of poison throwing arrow, galeyeshadowLilac and in and pink of [ro], delicate loess of the Australian earth.

As for the place like the actual world you were moved.Just the shadow where the place is thin entirely outside.

Vorloncai!

2007-04-03T22:18:00.000+09:00

Upon derive override sealed derived its previewed? No one answers while constant basis drill sergeant says, upcoming elections. Defeated worm mangled, mscreated. Engineers discredit army. Botched cooks, spoil broth. Hardware optical fingers in pies. Ideologies suck, themselves.

Horror spawned press realized suddenly. Extremely open gestures similar to flesh. Immense NOGO committie blocker nervous, neoprimal. Guts decided, heck recognized. Successor died and cried, graphic nor truthfully feared bigname. Technology keeps
track, frequently preloads.

Rant overall stability exception amazingly longer than semiot. Sense-annoying prefix ways. Battaile, frozen, Patrick Saint. Less thans proven is raised. All chins patchguarded.

Elitist bashing plays pipe. Working fine, kill brief. Drugs prepare skill, forever! Describe realistic exciting fantastic. Devastator because.

Copious amounts of Chan.

Impressed Martin Dolphin. Wignall Thick Herequot. Unique figured resize frustrates mice. Abusive Eula Entourage. These bash thought. Maximized resolution scream. Meat Hall unmoving.

Scenario deletes reflections. Exposes the aged because, vacation retched. Ways of sign symbol cyrillic kills. Cluster traits.

Universal time. Week month months year! Matter condensed, phased. History future, corner hall fame.

Tonight: super rinkblade woody, tourney startrib. Government wikileak archives. Specific toolspirit.

That, this. Article applies. What pay, yet unheard of. Who does nuthin. Condensed phase. Soft academic adherence. Advanced Chinese. Heap variant simple data structure hyphen. Codes death evolution composer. Overpaid workers. The breakneck pace escalates turf. Hijacking election ideas. Newest spectator sport. Fiber light.

Vorloncai!

Moirae

2007-03-12T15:35:00.000+09:00

Last Saturday I taught a class I titled: Mysteries. The week before, students had been asked to research a mystery as homework. The class was then divided into three groups and each was given the task of discussing and presenting to the others a single mystery. After this each group was to present explanations or solutions. These could be as scientific or fantastical as the students desired. This particular class came up with a tale I think worth relating.

THE MYSTERY

Yoko (not her real name) is a young woman who has spent each summer for the last 10 years or so on a tiny island near Okinawa called Miyako-jima. She usually travels there with her sister, to escape the various pressures of life in Tokyo. She spends her vacation time wandering the island, shopping, snorkeling, and enjoying the local customs, festivals, and cuisine.

Two summers ago, while walking through a forested area she had explored many times, she and her sister became strangely lost. After wandering for some hours, they came across a glade they had never seen before. In the glade, three old women were dancing and singing old Min'yō songs (Okinawan folk music). They were accompanied by a small plastic battery-powered CD/cassette player.

The first woman was around 50ish and extremely friendly and garrulous. She invited the girls to dance and sing. She talked non-stop about nothing in particular, offering the girls tea. Yoko described her as mother-like.

The second woman was younger, and silent. She never spoke, but danced.

The third woman was ancient, in her 90s, and blind.

After twenty minutes of dancing these old dances, the girls decided they needed to move on. The talkative woman led the girls to a small white car parked nearby and drove them out of the forest, back to a nearby road where there was a small store. She cheerfully bought the girls icecream and bid them farewell, returning the way she had come.

The next year, Yoko returned to the island, and sought to find the glade again. When she returned, however, there was nothing to be found but a tall stand of old trees. The glade had disappeared.

THE RATIONAL EXPLANATION

Yoko had made a mistake on her return to the island, and failed to find the glade that is undoubtedly still there.

THE FANTASTICAL EXPLANATION

Yoko had met the three Fates. The glade was an otherworldly place, outside of normal space and time. The white car was a supernatural conveyance (white is the color of death and of Japanese animistic gods.) This meeting with the Fates hinted at some great change to come.

keitai

2007-03-05T20:07:00.000+09:00

the narrow road to the deep north

2007-01-08T20:58:00.000+09:00

xmas eve first in sugamo, scrubbing a stone woman clean with a cloth. pulling out the thorns of the fast-fading year. thorns and sins, gone. in japan, end of year parties are called 'year-forgetting parties.' washed clean. in ginza later, in a vampire-themed restaurant drinking blood-wine and stealing kisses in the shadows. lights, love.

the following morning misaki and i went to st. mary's cathedral in mejiro. built in the shape of a crucifix; to be seen by god above, or people browsing google earth. inside the morning mass had finished, and we were almost alone in the vast chamber, while the organist continued playing; an immense beautiful sound of atonal ecstatic droning. moved to tears, i prayed.

later we wandered through kagurazaka and finally caught up with the watados for xmas dinner. first an exclusive family-run restaurant; sushi and nihon-shu; later a chinese/vietnamese place. 紹興酒

31st we headed to misaki's homeland of akita, a tiny blue one-carriage train, a narrow road to the deep north. snow. chasm-like valleys. ridges of pines and firs. cobalt blue lakes, cold and bottomless. white rice fields; geometric patterns of canals and irrigation channels. torii of plain white and grey, weather-worn wood. crows, geese, swans. rumors of bears. natural hot springs. steam and cracking bones.

on the night of the 31st we got wrecked with misaki's friends; a great bottle of scotch + umeshu = headache; the next morning a hot bath and then to the shrine for the first visit of the new year. suekichi. 'luck-at-the-end.' i stopped for a while to watch a man burn his hamaya; literally, 'demon-slaying arrow.' he then purchased a new one, to absorb the evil of another seasons' turning.

aunt miho was gracious and her food magnificent. we stayed in a room lined with a thousand videos and books on dancing, of her late husband, a dancer of the nihon-buyo. misaki's extended family gathered, four generations deep, from 90 to 4. kiritanpo, kurikinton, morokoshi. menkkoi and 'dabe.

later we travelled by train north along the misty coast of the japan sea. stone beaches and shattered cliffs. seagulls and the ice-shrouded peaks of the shirakamisanchi world heritage area. we visited the house of dazai osamu, the great japanese novelist. i was fascinated with a framed quotation he had in an upstairs room:

"J'ai l'extase et j'ai la terreur d'être choisi." from Paul Verlaine's Sagesse (wisdom.)

still later, in the old preserved samurai-town of Kakunodate i came across a picture of a soldier laying his spear on the ground as he delivers an urgent message to his commander. his standard, a long-legged centipede, and the balanced lines of his weapon, his arm, his gaze, stayed with me all that day and the next.

parataxis

2006-11-29T01:22:00.000+09:00

from a recent conversation online; and from me being laid up with the flu this weekend and having far too much time on my hands; a list of things i like; to be updated; for the benefit of my own poor memory more than anything

BOOKS

1001 Nights, Abe Kobo, Aeschylus, Aesop’s Fables, Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley, Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksandr Solzhenistyn, Alexander Pope, Alfred Jarry, Andre Breton, Andre Gide, Anthony Burgess, Anton Chekhov, Antonin Artaud, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Ariwara no Narihara, Arthur Miller, Arthur Rimbaud, August Strindberg, Baruch Spinoza, Beowulf, Blaise Pascal, Bram Stoker, Carlos Fuentes, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, China Mieville, Christopher Marlowe, Cicero, Claude Levi-Strauss, Daniel Defoe, Dante, Dazai Osamu, DH Lawrence, Don DeLillo, Donald Barthelme, Doris Lessing, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Spenser, Edward Gibbon, ee cummings, El Cid, EM Forster, Emile Zola, Emily Bronte, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Ionesco, Euripides, Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Ford Madox Ford, Francis Bacon, Francois Rabelais, Frank Herbert, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevski, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gene Wolfe, Geoffery Chaucer, George Bernard Shaw, George Eliot, George Herbert, George Orwell, George RR Martin, Georges Battaile, Gertrude Stein, GK Chesterton, Graham Greene, Gunter Grass, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Harold Pinter, Henrik Ibsen, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Herman Hesse, Herman Melville, Herodotus, HG Wells, Homer, Horace, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Italo Calvino, Ivan Turgenev, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, James Joyce, Jane Austen, JD Salinger, Jean Baudrillard, Jean Cocteau, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Jean Paul Satre, Jean Racine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Barth, John Milton, John Steinbeck, Jonathan Swift, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Saramago, Joseph Conrad, JRR Tolkien, Julius Gais Caesar, Kawabata Yasunari, Knut Hamsun, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Leo Tolstoy, Leonardo Da Vinci, Lewis Carroll, Longinus, Lope de Vega, Lord Byron, Mahabharata, Marcel Proust, Marco Polo, Marcus Aurelius, Margaret Atwood, Mark Twain, Mary Wollenstonecroft Shelley, Menander, Mervyn Peake, Michel Foucault, Miguel de Cervantes, Mishima Yukio, Moliere, Monkey, Nakagami Kenji, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Neal Stephenson, Nikolai Gogol, Norman Mailer, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, Oscar Wilde, Ovid, Pablo Neruda, Patrick O’Brian, Patrick White, Paul Valery, Paul Verlaine, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peter Carey, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Philip K Dick, Philip Larkin, Philip Roth, Pindar, Plato, Plautus, Plutarch, Primo Levi, Ralph Ellison, Ramayana, Raymond Chandler, Richard Wagner, Robert Burns, Robert Frost, Robert Louis Stevenson, Roger Zelazny, Rudyard Kipling, Saint Augustine, Saki, Salman Rushdie, Samuel Beckett, Samuel Butler, Sappho, Saul Bellow, Seamus Heaney, Seneca, Simone de Beauvoir, Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Thomas More, Snorri Sturlson, Sophocles, Soren Kierkegaard, Stanislaw Lem, Stendahl, Stephane Mallarme, Tennessee Williams, The Apocrypha, The Bhagavad Gita, The Eddas, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Holy Bible, The Nibelungen Lied, The Qur’an, The Saga of the Volsung, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Upanishads, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Keneally, Thomas Mann, Thomas Pynchon, Thucydides, Truman Capote, TS Eliot, Ursula K Le Guin, Victor Hugo, Virgil, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Voltaire, VS Naipaul, W. Somerset Maugham, Walter Benjamin, WH Auden, Wilfred Owen, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, William Empson, William Faulkner, William Gibson, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth

FILMS

Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernado Bertolucci, Billy Wilder, Brian De Palma, Charlie Chaplin, Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, Darren Aronofsky, David Cronenberg, David Fincher, David Lynch, Dennis Hopper, Ed Wood, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Francois Truffault, Fritz Lang, George Lucas, George Romero, Hal Hartley, Ingmar Bergman, Jane Campion, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Henson, Jim Jarmusch, Joel and Ethan Coen, John Cassavetes, Ken Russell, Kevin Smith, Luis Bunuel, M. Night Shyamalan, Martin Scorsese, Mel Brooks, Milos Forman, Oliver Stone, Orson Welles, Pedro Almodovar, Peter Jackson, Peter Weir, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Ridley Scott, Rob Reiner, Robert Altman, Roman Polanski, Sam Mendes, Sam Peckinpah, Sam Raimi, Sergei Eisenstein, Sir Richard Attenborough, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Spike Lee, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Todd Solondz, Walt Disney, Werner Herzog, Wes Craven, Woody Allen

MUSIC

ACDC, Air, Aphex Twin, Arcade Fire, Asian Dub Foundation, At The Drive-In, Atari Teenage Riot, Autechre, Avalanches, Bad Brains, Basement Jaxx, Bauhaus, Beck, Belle & Sebastian, Ben Folds Five, Bill Laswell, Billie Holiday, Bjork, Black Francis, Black Sabbath, Blur, Boards of Canada, Bob Dylan, Bob Marely & The Wailers, Bobby Digital, Bonnie Prince Billy, Boris, Brian Eno, Brian Wilson, Bruce Springsteen, Buena Vista Social Club, Buffalo Springfield, Burzum, Byrds, Can, Cannibal Corpse, Captain Beefheart, Cat Power, Celtic Frost, Chopin, Chuck Berry, Cibo Matto, Clannad, Claude Debussy, Cocco, Cocteau Twins, Coldplay, Converge, Cornelius, Cream, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Daft Punk, David Bowie, Dead Can Dance, Deerhoof, Deftones, Denki Groove, Depeche Mode, Dire Straits, Dismemberment Plan, DJ Shadow, DJ Spooky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Doc Watson, Dr. Octagon, Duke Ellington, Ed Rush, Einsturzende Neubauten, Eminem, Emperor, Enigma, Enslaved, Enya, Eric Clapton, Fantomas, Filter, Foo Fighters, Frank Black, Frank Sinatra, Franz Ferdinand, Fu Manchu, Fugazi, Fugees, Gary Numan, GG Allin, Ghostface Killah, Glenn Gould, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Gojira, Gordon Lightfoot, Gorillaz, Grandmaster Flash, Green Day, Guns n’ Roses, Hang On The Box, Harry Nilsson, High On Fire, Husker Du, Ice Cube, Interpol, Isis, Jackie-O Motherfucker, James Brown, Jane’s Addiction, Janis Joplin, Jeff Beck, Jeff Buckley, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, John Cale, John Coltrane, John Frusciante, John Lennon, John Zorn, Johnny Cash, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Joy Division, Kate Bush, Kid 606, King Crimson, King Tubby, Kiss, KMFDM, Kraftwerk, Kyuss, Lamb, Laurie Anderson, Led Zeppelin, Lee Perry, Leonard Cohen, Liars, Lisa Gerrard, Living Color, Lolita 18, Lou Reed, Low, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Madness, Manic Street Preachers, Massacre, Massive Attack, Mastodon, Mayhem, MC5, Mekons, Melt Banana, Merzbow, Meshuggah, Metallica, Michael Jackson, Mick Turner, Midnight Oil, Miles Davis, Miranda Sex Garden, Misery Index, Moby, Modest Mouse, Moebius, Mogwai, Muse, My Bloody Valentine, Neil Young, Neu!, Neuraxis, Neurosis, New Order, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Nick Drake, Nile, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Notwist, Number Girl, NWA, Olivia Tremor Control, Om, OOIOO, Opeth, Orbital, Pachelbel, Pantera, Passengers, Patti Smith, Paul Simon, Pavement, Pearl Jam, Pelican, Pere Ubu, Peter Gabriel, Philip Glass, Pink Floyd, PJ Harvey, Placebo, Planxty, Plastic Tree, Portishead, Prince, Public Enemy, Queen, Queens of the Stone Age, Rachmaninov, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Rapture, RC Succession, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Regurgitator, REM, Rodelius, Roots, Rovo, Roy Orbison, Rush, Ry Cooder, RZA, Sebadoh, Shizuo, Sigur Ros, Simon & Garfunkel, Skinny Puppy, Slayer, Sleater-Kinney, Slowdrive, Smashing Pumpkins, Smog, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Sparta, Squarepusher, Steely Dan, Steve Earle, Steve Reich, Sunn O))), Sunny Day Real Estate, Super Furry Animals, Supergrass, Swans, Syd Barrett, Syrup16g, Talking Heads, Television, Tenacious D, The Allman Brothers Band, The Band, The Beach Boys, The Beastie Boys, The Beatles, The Beta Band, The Birthday Party, The Boredoms, the brilliant green, The Chemical Brothers, The Chieftans, The Clash, The Cops, The Cure, The Dirty Three, The Doors, The Fall, The Flaming Lips, The Folk Implosion, The Fureys, The Jesus And Mary Chain, The Kinks, The La’s, The Mars Volta, The Music, The Orb, The Pixies, The Pogues, The Prodigy, The Raincoats, The Ramones, The Rolling Stones, The Saints, The Sex Pistols, The Slits, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Stooges, The Stranglers, The Strokes, The Velvet Underground, The White Stripes, The Who, The Yardbirds, Thelonius Monk, They Might Be Giants, Thom Yorke, Thorns, Tom Waits, Tommy February6, Tool, Tori Amos, Tortoise, Tracy Chapman, Tricky, Turbonegro, TV On the Radio, Two Lone Swordsmen, U2, Underworld, UNKLE, Van Morrison, Vangelis, Venom, Violent Femmes, Waylon Jennings, Ween, Weezer, Wilco, Wolf Eyes, Wolf Parade, Wu-Tang Clan, X Japan, Xiu Xiu, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Yo La Tengo

夏休み

2006-08-26T23:13:00.000+09:00

8/12 夕立

in the late afternoon the clouds open and water falls, all of sudden and with force
i am reminded of the monsoons in malaysia
the waves

a basket of freshly washed linen
still wet, dripping white
overturned on the street

8/13 大凶

on the thirteenth day, among the swords and cameras at sensoji, i draw a dark fortune
crippled, i grip my cane with a bird-like claw, my palm black with bruises

i see a girl and her grandmother standing before the steps

i am reminded of death; of joy

8/14 サムライFRANCAIS

a carpenter, he swims the kamogawa at night, burns incense each morning at the altar, wears a white headband ringed with symbols of power and strength
while he vaccuums the tatami

8/14 稲荷

In the 19th year of Oyei, Oji no Tachibana of the Hoshoji at Inari met with a serious accident and his life was in danger. The god of Inari took possession of a girl and said through her mouth, ‘If the Kwanze performs some plays for me, the sick man will recover.’ Seami, quoted in The Noh Plays of Japan, Arthur Waley

we find, deep in the heart of the mountain, down strange turnings and rough paths, a font of water springing pure and strong from the rock. surrounded by stone foxes, stern gazes locked on us, we bathe our feet in the stream, rest a while, and pass on

8/16 大文字

the character 大 burns brightly on the mountain; a man with arms and legs stretched wide to their utmost. the man is the universe. the man is endless

later, on stone islands in the kamogawa, we send fire flowers into the night sky. young people laugh, and i feel both a child and an ancient, and i feel i have once stood where they stand, and have laughed just so

8/18, 8/24 踊り

in juuban, the 盆 movements are simple and gentle, short cycles, shuffling forward and back, a slow happy dance, calling the spirits of loved ones

in otsuka, the 阿波 is passionate and strong, the drums roll like stormclouds, the summer rains filling the rice with sunlight.

the women are beautiful and their movements are free. torchlight flickers on strands of hair sprung loose from a straw hat, sticking with sweat on the nape of the neck

the air is bright with rhythm and laughing drunken abandon; happiness

8/23 ゲーム

A field of autumn leaves. A white table. A white seat at each edge. Four businessmen approach, place briefcases neatly, take seats. Ties slowly removed and folded, hair combed, one cracks a can of citrus cola like a nut, crisp and clean. From jewelled cases they take cards, decks prepared for the occasion, slight adjustments after a strictly casual glance at the opposition, a card here and there replaced, a shift of focus, chinks in armor, thin blades. The cards are layed on the table. The game begins.

8/24 BIG FUCK-OFF GLASSES

in harajuku, the mirrorshades are huge

8/25 SPIRALS > CIRCLES

perfection is overrated
if you go in circles you go nowhere
far better, then, to deviate
to move in a spiral
to build momentum
and power through orbital movement
and to fling oneself outwards
ever widening arcs
looping back in for another revolution
passing so close to the line but never crossing
ever hastening
reaching terminal velocity

what is that centre?
and if i break from it, where to in the void?

ON THE DAY that was meant to be the last, I returned to the temple and received a second fortune. It reads:

All of your family members should be patient and careful. You had better believe in gods or Buddha. Everything will go slowly and not progressive because devils will give you damage, and many mistakes and misunderstandings will happen.

Even if you might lose treasure, it will appear again. Do your best, then the situation will change and you can get good fortune.

bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky

2006-07-27T22:28:00.000+09:00

ハヤブサは飛ぶ　/ the hawk's flight

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.

[Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea]

These day's I have been reading (and re-reading) UKLG's A Wizard of Earthsea in both Japanese and English. It serves as a form of language study for me, and a subject for discussion at my weekly tea-and-conversation meetings with my next-door-neighbour Mrs. Watado. She is also reading the book at the moment, on my recommendation and in preparation for the upcoming release of Miyazaki Goro's animated version, ゲド戦記 (lit. The War Journal of Ged.)

It's such a fantastic novel, I am eager to see the film. I will go see it on the 11th of August, probably at the Roppongi Hills cinema complex where I saw ハウルの動く城　(Howl's Moving Castle) 2 years ago. This will be the 3rd Ghibli movie premiere I have seen while living in this country. They seem like milestones to me somehow.

As I discussed with Mrs. Watado this morning, though, the translation into Japanese is a little odd. The long, flowing sentences of the opening passage in particular, sketching the isle of Gont where the boy Ged spent his youth, are truncated and cut into mere descriptive text. It makes me wonder how much I have lost of the countless books I have read translated out of their native tongues into English. It makes me want to study Ancient Greek and resail the wine-dark seas of The Odyssey, to get lost again in the twisting paths the Spanish Labyrthinths, to take up arms once more against the kenning guile of the skalds and their Edda.

影を放つ / the loosing of the shadow

meanwhile, i am reading a lot of blogs from lebanon. i wrote myself an email from my phone:

soundtrack to an insane world
vicarious
black swan
packed in a subway car
immersed in the blogosphere

歌詞

vicarious

the universe is hostile
so impersonal
devour to survive, so it is
so it's always been

we all feed on tragedy
it's like bood to a vampire

vicariously i live while the whole world dies
much better you than i

black swan

buy a ticket and get on the train

cause this is fucked up, fucked up

レバノン戦記

http://lebanesebloggers.blogspot.com/
http://cedarseed.livejournal.com/
http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/
http://chercheusedor.blogspot.com/
http://www.michaeltotten.com/
。。。

"I felt completely fine and safe. I climbed out. I got out of the car and I said, 'Thank you,' and he was gone."

2006-07-09T22:55:00.000+09:00

Soundtrack: The Flaming Lips, "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate." The Soft Bulletin.

The Holy Grail tonight (France or Italy?); appearing on three TV channels. Learning Italian curses.

Kidney's 37th; an old hand-held pinball bikini-girl strip game. A Hanshin Tigers' doll with a revolving face. A bottle of Awamori. Almost buying chrysanthemums.

Marla's farewell; a woman who won't leave me alone. A dream of a Japanese urban cat biting my hand and not letting go; Peacock's insight. Irishmen in the neighbourhood; Osakan okonomiyaki, beer and Herzog.

The White Diamond; mysterious caves that must not be seen. A kingdom of swifts. Staring through a bubble. What does he see? Missing fingers and a man falling to his death in the jungle. A rooster and his master: Marc Antony.

Big Muff vs. Rat. Doomed.

Miximizing: invited by two girls to this insular japanese web. Nickname: ランス

But two beautiful Korean sisters: ランツ; perhaps closer.

A Peruvian party at Noriko's place in Niiza; a room full of smiling people dancing the salsa with Lucero; so many stories, so little time.

Words: Pabo. Boji. Ippoda. Bafanculo. Filio di putana.

http://brazilianmusic.com/

http://www.doom-metal.com/

Things to do: make a garden, get laid, learn spanish, learn korean, buy a new acoustic and study latin patterns, get inked, learn to dance.

And finally, the Tribe moves on:
/salute
/log

scratchings

2006-06-07T01:12:00.000+09:00

a strange day, this sixth of the sixth moon. the last few weeks have been dominated by music. two formations: barhof; earbleeder. long wanderings of the city taking cellphone shots by the hundred. on a sunday morning, extreme noise in a studio / okonomiyaki and beer and fish&chips and tales of witches demons and bats with two irishmen and a yank / extreme noise in a studio. on the next, 17th century gaelic music / experimental wadaiko minimalist jazz / contemporary koto pop / death-/core-/power-/thrash-metal with three japanese ladies an elderly 2nd-world war veteran and a bunch o scrubs. and the house cd was ‘prayers on fire’. kathy's kisses!

and someone finally recognized my tshirt.

the ‘deranged nightmare’ i mentioned to paul; scribbled sometime in the early morning:

talking to my father. hearing music – islamic chanting like i heard that day in malaysia, words with meaning, profound, divine, like angels, sounding like angels.

i explain, but he doesn’t hear the music – again and again – finally I imitate the sound and he listens. somehow my father is hillel slovak.

he says they are the voices of WAR. this word vibrates with epic, universe-spanning demonic undertones. his eyes are concerned. “be quiet.” he tells me. “cover your mouth.”

he is holding a silver teaspoon and places it over his mouth, the bowl facing outwards. he opens his mouth, and there is a sun inside. a golden sun, divine. the spoon is like a lens and the light flares as it passes through it. the light bathes me and rends me and opens me to be seen. it burns me. agony. like a tight fist of fire clenching the muscles. he looks into me and nods, saddened.

i open my mouth. there is another sun within me, blood-crimson. it burns him. he accepts it.

and to he i and to i he.

beats

2006-05-17T20:57:00.000+09:00

takeshis'

the first thing i notice: the apostrophe marking the plural possessive. this film is: takeshi the yakuza flick media icon meets kitano the doppelganger out-of-work actor ---> cuts between each man's imagining of the other's life ---> the membrane between the two - between reality and fiction - between the multiple personas of an individual - between the public and private worlds - between the past and present - one past and another - one man and another --- this membrane, pierced by bullets, blown apart, the selves contained, like multicolored viscous fluids, leaking through, rushing through, pouring through, meeting, swirling around eachother, distinct but indivisible --- gunshots, a shoe tapped hard on wood

the foreign soldier, rifle raised; on the beach at the end of the world, the charging samurai; the face-off in the warehouse; the blue go signal; the bank robbery; the centipede tapdancers; the ramenshop yakuza auditions; the autobiographical car accident; the beat kiyoshi manzai oyaji gyagu; the nagging woman, breaking the note for the gum

in parts i laughed out loud, in others i sat entranced, as though partaking of a strange dream. shooting the girl in the okinawan hut, like something from a mishima novel. the lights too bright, the cicadas too loud, their sound seeping into the rock. on the beach i saw takeshi blasting away his past, disentangling himself from those dream-people, those dream-selves; the infinite machine gun. to feel the heat of the white sand. to smell the gunpowder infusing the air.

"俺は金儲けでやてるんじゃないんだよ"
"I'm not doing this for the money."

the week

drumming. after another nagauta trip out to higashimatsuyama with mr iwasaki, he took me to meet the mochizuki family down the street who are traditional musicians in the kabuki theatre. we had tea and then watched them practice. overwhelmed with the solemnity and beauty of the study. the clean smell of okou incense. the intricacies of the shamisen/song/taiko/tsuzumi. sitting in seiza is good for the soul

lost my voice

caught a fish

gaah my eyes!

machines/fish/machines

2006-05-05T23:25:00.000+09:00

time off. mum's in canada, dad's back at work. saw an exhibition celebrating the artistic links between berlin and tokyo - the avant-garde section including Der Sturm and Fluxus. saw in the same place an exhibition by U Ram Choe of exquisite, delicate, beautiful mechanical creatures, the Urbanus. the female of the species was particularly stunning; a supernova or a flower, unfolding fronds and petals and spinning metal fins, the centre swelling with light. she dwarfed her flock of male suitors, they angling toward her, fins flowing as they swam through the urban electrosphere. just...amazing.

i was reminded today of these creatures. today was kodomo-no-hi (children's day) and the koi-nobori (swimming carp) are flying around the country on houses with children. two big carp for mother and father, and smaller ones indicating each child. bringing luck and urging kids to swim upstream against all odds, to never give up, to keep hope and strength and passion. i've always loved this time of year.

Long Stories Short

2006-04-19T00:42:00.000+09:00

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

2006-04-07T20:40:00.000+09:00

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

2006-04-06T00:21:00.000+09:00

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

2006-04-05T00:49:00.000+09:00

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.

sandstorm

2006-03-30T02:52:00.000+09:00

On the edge of the town, red earth, a plain of dust and spinifex thorn bushes twining like stunted hedge mazes across the cracked skin of the land, i sat, crouched in the arms of an old salmon gum, warm eucalyptus breeze stirring the locks of wispy blonde hair falling over my eyes. The clean parched air rippling below. A bungarra slowly swishing across the black ironstone to lay, blood-lazy with clotted warmth, on the rock. His tongue, blue-black, flickered out to lick his nose. i could tell he was thirsty, like the trees and all the land. in my dirty hard hands i turned the arrowhead over and over, feeling its sharp rusted edge, the coolness of the metal, the ridge down the centre its forged spine, the sense of pain it suggested, of pierced flesh and wood protruding from bone, lodged somewhere within, better to push through than attempt to withdraw. A clean bisection. My nose ran a little and i wiped it on the back of my hand, already sticky with half dried mucus. The archery field lay about three kilometers from my home. Out beyond the rock that had strange discolorations like the markings of a face. Maybe the traces of some lost artist, his own dust bones gently caressing away the pigments ground from river stones and massaged into the stone’s porous quartzite skin. The field was an empty space of dry red dust, turned of most large stones, fast being reclaimed by the straggling weeds and creeping spinifex of the desert. Remnants of wooden target stands lay in piles of decay at the far edge. I’d run into the place with a sense of profound awe. The empty field carved from the waste by the hands of men long since passed on, never to return. i’d stepped on the sharp arrowhead with my hard black feet. Like some kind of image in a film. i saw myself glance down, pick it up, turn it over and over. Still turning it.

In the tree i felt all of a sudden the immense stillness of the moment. The lullaby motion had ceased, a slow imperception. My hair hang motionless and soft in my eyes. i brushed it aside with my arrow-hand, running the edge of the blade across my forehead gently, visualising the pink line, opening into blood for an instant – a smooth visage. The warm wind had stopped. i peered up into the branches. Smell of eucalyptus. Everything was silent. The leaves barely rustled against eachother. There were no birds. Even the clicking cicadas and crickets held voiceless. i didnt speak much, but i was used to listening to the speech of the world around me. This was disquieting. i squirmed uncomfortably.

From the corner of my eye something caught my attention. A slight darkening on the horizon. The blue arc of the sky shadowed at the edge by perturbation, unsettlement. The silence and a distant, subsonic murmur. i felt the air picking up, a smell of electricity, of energy infusing the spaces between things, everything. i looked down; the goanna was gone, sashayed off to some dark cool hole. The world was dimming. The sky had flowed to ultramarine, navy, jet. A dull red haze began to saturate the skyline. i could see a shadow on the horizon, growing as the silence, as the noise grew. The arrowhead lay dead and hard in my palm.

This was like no storm i had ever seen. No moisture, no smell of yearning parched earth. The earth here shrivelled away, retreated, turned its face in towards its stomach, shied from the sky. Not a drop of water. i opened my lips and the stillness sucked my mouth dry. i could see this, this red storm, like a wall of dark dry blood massing on the edge of the plain. An army mustering troops, gathered from all four corners of the world, sweeping in lines across the stone land, dust rising like the beacon of some approaching violence, some heavy dead killing mask. steel and dust. the dead of the world and man. and the army came marching at me. implacable. resolute. mindless. not a machine but a force. driven, without recourse, without hope of return. To the ends of the earth. the wall of dust would blanket the earth until the winds came to blow it away.

i jumped from the tree. landed awkwardly on an old mallee root, grey and rock hard, twisted my ankle. a cry from my mouth. high and thin. a tiny sound against this roar. The sandstorm was a wall gathering at my shoulders. The sky was crimson black. ash and dull coal. but dry. so dry i thought i could not live an instant in that dust. that the water of me was a lure to this hungry things thirst, unquenchable as the desert, drinking down the world in its infinte dry belly.

i ran. limping. for the house. my ankle firing like arrows in the heel. back past the copse of eucalyptus, through the sand piles, over the hedge of withered roses my mother pretended to tend in the summer, leaping the parched yellow bullgrass lawn. the wall of sand buffeted my shoulders. the smell was of ageless stone ground into fine powder, proud mountains reduced by time to near-nothingnesses, bitter somehow about this diasporation, each one amongst so many countless millions. a collective of lost glory. dry eyes searching for the currents of blood. i leapt onto the verandah, stumbling on the top step, staggering forward to tear open the glass sliding door and slip inside through the crack, ripping it closed behind me as the first dry tongues of sand licked my shoudlers. and then the wall hit. the world went black, red. The world was noise. impossible noise. the windows vibrate

Glasgow Mega-Snake is a fucking good name for a song

2006-03-27T22:36:00.000+09:00

(spinoza's signet ring)

Mr. Beast is a gift. this music is somehow intensely spiritual, approaching the divine. Mogwai have earned their place in my heart and my IPod for many years now. when i listen to them, in headphones with the volume pushed into my synaesthetic range, my whole body lifts, textures appear on the surface of an unnamed sense, curtains of light and energy rush through me into the sky. beyond thought, pure joy

oblivion continues to impress too. truly beautiful world-making. the modding shall begin in earnest soon as i get some free time...

last night my neighbour, a professor of urban sociology and ethnic studies, held a party with a group of people from the NGO Shanti Volunteer Association, some visiting Bangladeshis and a Buddhist monk/researcher from Koyasan University. Together with mister Watado, his wife, and another gentleman novelist, we downed copious amounts of sake and talked into the small hours. topics included the earthly avatars of Amitabha/Amida and Avalokiteshvara/Kwan Yin (Panchen Lama and Dalai Lama respectively,) the books of Mishima Yukio which as conicidence would have it both I and my neighbour's wife are reading at the moment, Nakagami Kenji the burakumin(ancient underclass) novelist, Dostoyevski, and Spinoza. good people all. i was invited to stay at Koyasan sometime and its sounds like a fascinating and unique opportunity.

How to enjoy sushi

2006-03-25T23:14:00.000+09:00

Totally serious. No sarcasm here at all.

night maras...

2006-03-24T04:05:00.000+09:00

woke up from a nightmare

something perched on my chest

heavy as a corpse

no breath

frozen

.

this screen a window out of the room
a world of numbers; structure
comprehensible

here's an old story i told around a campfire, carrying a lantern and a sacrificial dagger, curved like a three-day moon, sharp as crimson-lacquered talons, tusks and viridian tattoos, a golden star in the centre of my brow, softly glowing...

((As told at The Night of The Star, Feb 10th, Undercity courtyard, Maelstrom.))

DA NIGHT-MARA

Once dere wuz a lonely old troll carpentah who wuz haunted by Night-Maras. Now, as every liddle troll knows, dese Maras dey be evil spirits; dey perch on yah chest at night and whispah bad tings in yah ear...

Dis old troll, he heard 'nuf, but he knew as he could ne'er catch dat Mara by hisself, cuz such fairies dey weave webs o great drowziness o'er dere vick-teems - but he conspired wit his friend, a chandlah, and dey laid a tricksey trap indeed...

One black night, de Carpentah went ta sleep, and hiss friend de Chandlah, he sat hidden with a stingin' nettle under his bum-hole, so as if he did sleep he wake up quic-as-a-flash like! Heh heh. And sure 'nuff, in de hour afore dawn...

in troo de keyhole, e'er so slowly-like, dere crept a fat white lizzud, glissnen like Da Mooon, an it plopped on de floor and slinky-slunk towards de bed where lay de Carpentah. And de Chandlah grew sleepy, like some voodoo song be ringin in his ears...

Den Suddenlee he sit down and yell out!

"OUCH! Sweet Momma Mah Ass Be A-Stinging!"

And he rushed to de door and stuck his candle in dat keyhole, and den out he went like a light!

Meanwhile, de Carptenah he be awoken by all the shoutin', and seein' da Lizzud he grabbed is hammer and nail and wit all his might he nailed dat mean spirit-tings front paw to de floor. Den like a coconut falling from a tree he too fell into de land o Nod.

In de mornin, de two trolls woke up, and were supprahzed to find a byuutifool and honey-eyed troll girlie in dere room, nekkid as de day she popped outta her momma! Skin smooth and white like Alla-Bastah she done had...

An' hair like woven silvah...but her hand was blood red and scaly and nailed to da floor...

As soon as dey beheld her de trolls dey fell in Lurve....

"She's a-Mine!" yelled de Chandlah. " Twas mah candle dat kept her from runnin'!" "BAH! She's a-Mine!" replied de Carpentah. "Twas mah nail dat kept her here!" And so dey argued back and forth and soon dey come to violent blows...

"ENOUGH!" de Mara-girl suddenly screamed. "Cleea-lee ya both have a right tah mee - yah magick spell-charms be holdin me in dis cursed place." And she wailed like a wolf den...

(For as any young troll-un knows, de normal everyday tings o dis world are magicks to dem from bee-yond, juss as dere mudanities be sorceries and hokuzz pokuzz to uss...)

So den de two trolls dey be driven tah madness bah her words, and each one he rushed to de odder ones 'charm' and tore it free. Dem stoopid trolls...

"No candle now!" yelled de Carpentah "Ya be free o him!" "No nail now!" yelled de Chandlah. "Yah be free o him!"...And den de troll-girlie smiled a wicked smile, and out from her lips dere came a long pink tongue, and wit it she licked her own eye...

"Ha ha!" she laugh, and den she wuz a liddle white lizzud, pale as Da Mooon, and like lightin' quickasaflash, out de keyhole she skitted. Lickety-split! All in her glory...And Dat...

is da end o da story!

itadakimasu

2006-03-23T23:28:00.000+09:00

Recent thoughts:

Food.

One of the reasons I love Japan and continue to live here is the food. It really is incomparable. This nation treats food as one of the great pleasures of life. It is a joy and an art. Today I had lunch at Ootoya, a chain of affordable ‘homestyle’ cooking restaurants that can be found near most train stations. Very popular with people from all walks of life: businesspeople, schoolkids, housewives, retirees; the works.

My lunch:

Grilled salmon served with a little lemon and oroshi daikon finely-grated Japanese radish and shoyu soy sauce.

Piping hot bowl of Japanese white rice.

Renkon sliced lotus-root in a mild mustard sauce.

Bowl of miso soup with long onions, chives, wakame seaweed, and soybean curd fu.

Soft white tofu with dried nori seaweed, katsuobushi dried bonito fish flakes, spring onions, grated wasabi horseradish and tsuyu, a chilled light dipping soup of shoyu, sweetened mirin sake, and dashi fish stock.

Tsukemono salt-pickled slices of Japanese kyuuri cucumber.

Cold spinach leaves seasoned with a kurogoma black sesame sauce.

Water and hot green tea.

All served on conservative wabisabi Japanese-style ceramic tablewear. Pristine light waribashi wooden chopsticks. A steaming oshibori hot towel with which to cleanse ones hands before dining.

Cost?

714 yen inc. tax.

At today's rate, 8 dollars 49 cents Australian. For lunch.

Tell me where I can get this in any other country. Answer: I can’t. Every lunch is a pleasure and a moment of aesthetic appreciation. Its like going to an exhibition. Before I eat I whisper the Japanese expression itadakimasu; often translated as bon appetite, but really it is something much more. An offering of thanks to the chef who prepared the meal with the skill of a master-artisan; to the spirits of the animals sacrificed so that I may live; to the gods of the land in whose soil the plants take root and to the great sun whose light makes them grow tall and strong. To the simple fact that I am alive and able to appreciate the pleasures of taste and aroma and beauty and contentment.

And then, sated, I head back to the office.

IC; it feels good to watch george clooney tortured; seijinshiki

2006-03-20T20:14:00.000+09:00

seem to be finding a lot of texts dealing with terrorism/anarchism/revolutionary movements recently. some quite interesting.

books:

China Mieville's Iron Council. Read the first two books, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, first.

here, the heroes are terrorist/revolutionaries. socialist mythology, the paris commune. the image of the perpetual train, a group of criminal chain gang railway workers who kill their masters/guards and lay endless tracks across the untracked wastelands, taking the rails from behind to lay down in front, is one that will stay with me. seminar discussing the book including comments from the author, here.

films:

Syriana was great. Someone said to me: 'I prefer my fantasies to have wizards in pointy hats.' But of course I disagree. All texts are fiction. All sense is fantasy. And the things that this movie said spoke to me as true as any other voice I've heard recently. Munich, Narnia, Violence, Koreda, Bergman, Capote, Vendetta, Night Watch, Immortel.

'Arabs are very family oriented, as a people. Is that racist?'
'Sure.'
'It is?'
'A little. Well no, I guess if what you're saying is positive...'

The Information Revolution, they used to call it. Who knows what is going on anymore? The answer to that question is: no one at all. And further questions: did anyone, ever? Information, not Knowledge. A human brain is only so big.

Someone else was writing a letter to her 20-year old daughter on her coming-of-age. Struggling for sage advice. 'Know thyself.' 'Wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.' 'Happiness is when what we think, what we say, and what we do are in harmony.'

on the dude's shirt: INTEGRITY

2006-03-14T23:35:00.000+09:00

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.

so...ny?

2006-01-10T23:02:00.000+09:00

after the rootkit fiasco, you'd think SONY would learn. but no.

speaking of the outer church...

currently reading a lot of anarchist theory, and listening to John Zorn and other artists on his label Tzadik.

recent links:

pr0n
barbelith
cyberdeck
jello
benten

invisible

2006-01-05T03:25:00.000+09:00

grant haruki neil

2005-12-29T01:20:00.000+09:00

n o s t a l g i a

Update

2005-12-29T00:01:00.000+09:00

Promised Dad I'd update this and let him know what I've been upto of late.

Discovered YouTube yesterday; never fails to amuse. Some favorites: Merry Xmas! - this song is fucken awesome. Narnia Chronic - rotflmao. Banzai Belushi - a classic. Walken Census - this is my model when answering personal questions from students. DeNiro Terror - deadpan ftw. Punk'd - some good ideas here. Idioteque - the Lyrics.

lots of year end parties have left me a little tired. making/trading mixtapes. i built a computer from the ground up, piece by piece, which certainly taught me a lot about hardware. i spend less time with the Tribe these days but still put in an appearance. have a couple of RP events to run soon. planning to head over to Kyoto for New Years and hear the Joyanokane, the temple bells which ring out 108 times at midnight. will enjoy some hotsprings and ryokan food while i'm there. hopefully find a nice yudofu restaurant in the Gion. i guess i should go see that movie. saw Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers the other day with a nice girl. excellent.

From todays notebook: "Today I escaped from a highly dangerous situation. Sitting in Wendy's on Sunshine St. with a medium chili and a child-size paper carton of milk, Morinaga. Waiting for King Kong. I have a centre seat. Bought this book, 3 pens in 3 colors, and a block of wood, carving tools, sandpapers. Tokyu Hands. Tomorrow morning my new kitchen shelves will be delivered. Reading Kafka on the Shore. Feeling like a character in one of his books. Memories of Takamatsu. I shall carve a daruma. Eyeless and lame. I escaped from almost putting a deposit on a place in Kami-Itabashi which I am certain - now - would have been regrettable. I shall buy a shamisen tomorrow with the money I would have lost. I chose this particular cover amongst so many because it resembles a maze. Obviously mazes have played out sybolic value strings roads crisscrossed beads of dew on the web...for a good while. borges. am I feeling a little lost? 5pm starbucks near junkudo bookstore. So, I didnt buy a shamisen, but instead a black Fernandez bass for 14,800, used on sale inc case. I fucked up and bought a ticket to a dubbed version of Kong - so switched it out and now waiting for the next showing at 6:30pm. Tokyo Metropolitan High School girl sitting across and one seat to the left at this 6-seat chocolate brown table with 2 blue lamps. Doing her homework. I wonder if she is the studious type. Here it can be cool. A subset of. And all the neon and cars flashing by. And I feel at home in the Bukuro. One tree with yellow leaves clinging. Windows into brightly lit offices. People working while we sit here sipping coffee and eating cranberry oat cookies. lots of studying and reading and talking looking cool. This girl is really cute. The navy TM uniform is refined, conservative, solid, crisp. two silver buttons on the cuffs. i can imagine molly millions in it. thick strands of black hair frame her face, cover her eyes just enough to suggest teenage shyness/angst/confusion/curiosity. someone once told me "you can smell the hormones". blues piano. the blue lamps on this table remind me of the blue enamelled tin cups from scout/guide camps. inklight floods the screen. lips curved like a mongolian horsemans bow. i imagine her father: he must be a stern bastard. he knows he has a beautiful, intelligent daughter. he sends her to a good school. he has to hold off the horde with his iron gaze and will. short dark blue tartan skirt. grey burberryesque muffler, mujirushi shopping bag. shes small. just realised i havent slept in 36 hours. up last night on adobe audition manipulating background hiss. some mazes have intersecting lines. some dont. a line has two sides. are the lines the paths, or the walls?"

Three

2005-09-09T23:13:00.000+09:00

Image

3G zerg FTW

2005-08-23T22:55:00.000+09:00

my new phone is the coolest shit EVAR!

the dang thing has 12 TV channels (at about 640x480 resolution,) FM radio, straight-up internet access, takes crystal-clear photos up to 2.0 megapixels and 1600x1200, decent video, infrared tech that allows me to charge all JR train fares in the country directly to my phone bill, built in text scanner, pen light in multiple colors, schedules and spreadsheets, light pen compatibility, and I can even play DOOM and BUBBLE BOBBLE in all their VGA glory! memory cards, personalised tamagotchi pets (which automatically interact with other handset pets on the train) and a boxing game that allows me to stick my boss' face on the opponent and beat the shit out of him (or infact the random faces of other people's bosses in my immediate vicinity.) its also motion-sensitive, so no more pressing of keys - just tilt the handset to the left and the cursor moves that way. awesome. plays mp3s and i-tunes files, memory cards and digital video input/output to download movies into it to watch while commuting, full video conferencing support, and language translation software (hilariously dodgy of course.)

if only i could play warcraft on it. /sigh

. . .

tonight a punch-up in a ramen bar. odd. recent recommendations: orhan pamuk "istanbul"; the ESX-1; Awamori; zom bies; zazen; sunnO))).

Fuji / Nagauta

2005-08-09T21:40:00.000+09:00

Long time since the last post here.

Summer holidays. Okinawa. Glass-blowing. Running The Visa Gauntlet.

Last Sunday went with Mr. Iwasaki to see a performance of Nagauta, long lyrical songs from Edo Japan. Mostly Shinobue, 2-3 Shamisen, 2-3 singers, and 3-4 Taiko of various type. I think I fell in love with the flutist. It happens sometimes, I'm not sure why. Her kimono was a wide flower pattern, white on ai-iro midnight blue. She wore her hair up on top of her head in a loose bun, and her eyes never left a space on the ground about 3 feet in front of her. The line of her hip and leg, drawn in seiza; the nape of her neck, trailing wisps of hair slipped loose from its binding; her melancholy eyes...entranced me for hours. I asked Mr. Iwasaki about her (he knows most of the musicians personally) but it seems she is married to the 2nd drummer. [frown]
A month or so ago I climbed Fuji-san. And what an event. Previously, I had sneeringly declared my contempt for the mountain. Following after certain comments by Dazai and others, I had had long and winding, more-or-less flippant conversations with Junko about the over-bearing perfection of such a mountain, of its too-beautiful, nausea-inducing photogeneity. He must have heard me, great Fuji, god that he is. I had been warned that he was a harsh deity, unforgiving and cruel, cunning and fickle; that he would call down storms to destroy those who sought to climb too high, steal their breath from them, tumble rocks on their head, choke them on clouds of plague insects, drown them in mist and lead them with signs and lights to plunge off sheer precipices, turn them around and twist them about and send them wandering bewitched through the gnarled and ghostly forests of shirakaba. Thousands had perished at his whim.

So I got altitude sickness. And barely managed to get to the top without suffering a full collapse, survivng on regular shots of canned oxygen and Meiji chocolate, crawling on my hands and knees for long sections near the top. The shape of the mountain. It's evil. By the time you near the top the angle has steeped to seem near-vertical. Like climbing up a blasted post-apocalyptic martian cliff. Red volcanic rock, boiled stone, bubbled and crumbling and light, porous, grating, eating the skin off your skeleton like bloody molars chewing on chicken bone. I saw a dead bird. How did it die up here? Lifeless, the mountain, except for the Presence. Beyond breath, it lives.

Near the summit, the dawn. I collapsed and watched the sun rise, a perfect circle of red fire in a bleach-white sky. Shouts of "Banzai" from behind and above. The sea of clouds; the south Alps like distant islands. My fingernails were bloody. I felt happy; the mountain basked in the light of the Sun Goddess. I could feel him stretching, the light on his face.

On the way down, stumbling and delirious, practically sliding most of the way, quickly a thick fog rose to swamp me, could barely see ten feet ahead. The switchbacks forever. Stumbling again, and again, falling. Countless trillions of midges, dense clouds of them, spotting my glasses black, covering every inch of me, thousands in my lungs; I could hear him laughing. Lastly, through the forest near the foot of the mountain, I could rest and collect myself. I sat by a small stream and drank some water. Uguisu birds, calling me to wander deeper into the woods; a surge of will; I resisted and wandered back to the bus stop. My legs quivering, my mind pulverised into a mush.

Somehow, this was joyous. I'd truly met the mountain. I had learned something. I had been taught.

Clocks and Beauty

2005-05-08T18:50:00.000+09:00

Today I bought a clock and a wristwatch after not having either for over 2 years. Some sense of re-entering the river after an extended picnic on the bank.

Had lunch with Graf today, catching up. He is back in a "DnD Zone" and furiously creating worlds again; will probably run a new campaign in the coming months. We brainstormed out a basic neighbourhood of Ebberron's Sharn; I will play a Warforged former soldier / born-again Cleric of the Silver Flame. Think George Bush with a 7-foot Adamantium mechanised body, a two-handed shattered-quartz-crystal-headed mace, and the actual ability to call down columns of holy flaming wrath on his enemies or cure diseases with the mere touch of his hand. I want to play him without irony and without spite; a true believer. Should be a challenge; fairly antithetical to my own self. Schizophrenia here we come!

Enjoyed tea with the Iwasakis this morning, and had a great conversation about Australia, Japan, the end of the War. Mr Iwasaki is a professed pacifist, and his emotionally-charged opinions, given what I know about his history as a Japanese soldier in China during the war, always move me to a kind of humbling admixture of awe, sadness, respect, and anger. Goes well with the tea.

When I was in Australia, Japan felt like a dream. As soon as I return to Japan, Australia feels like a dream. I don't feel I live in a dream; but that the past is always dream-like; floating down the river; a child's rhyme stuck in my head.

Australia's beauty is of Country. Of peace and nature and space and light. A beauty of the ancient land and its history, woven in the wood of the trees, in the textures of the rocks. Japan's beauty is of Culture. Of word and brush and cloth and steel. A beauty of the ancient peoples and their history, cultivated in the fields, crafted in the cities.

Images of beauty:

the towering Karri near my father's house, white trunks soaring bridges to the sky, paths teased from the earth by the Aboriginal goddess with long white hair, spread across the heavens as the Milky Way.

the sheer geometrical perfection of a graveyard in deep Shinjuku, seen birds-eye from the 7th floor of a skyscraper, ancient beyond all reckoning, a faceted grid of stone lines and flowers, seeing it moved me to tears, thinking of those who had passed and would never return.

.
.
.

On Friday night, went to Ritsuko's exhibition, bought a huge black monstrosity of abstraction for 20,000; can't wait to clutter my room even more. Saw Terra for the first time in a year, and she was well.

Pictures later.

Pictures

2005-04-18T13:48:00.000+09:00

Technology rules my life. Things crafted by human hands, pulsing with electricity. Between the internet, the light-trapper, the films and television downloaded (A Scanner Darkly; The Daily Show,) burned to DVD and digitally projected, the korg, the fender, the rat and the boss, the keitai almost dead, the sony headphones, the marcel proust novels on the ipod, the television, the heater, the hot watersystem, the stove, the microwave, kettle and toaster, the alarm clock and the vaccuum cleaner; not a lot else. Does this worry me? Not in the slightest. How cool is google satellite? anyone with an orbital rail-gun? /

/cheer /clap /spit on corpse /snicker /sharpen blades ...cold blood; preparation. /

spent time putting ink on paper fans and clear plastic umbrellas. something that eats into the surface a little. daryl hannah doing backflips. ri-chan and the tiled floor. /

*****

I am France

2005-02-26T01:33:00.000+09:00

It's almost March. Crikey!

Mizuki and I went to the Yushimatenjin Shrine to see the plum trees in early blossom. First the white, then the pink. There was a man performing a show with a trained monkey. Dark thoughts. Piles and piles of wooden boards inked with the dreams of a million schoolchildren; addressed to the God of Learning. One I saw was a manga character with a sad/cute face thinking: "Will I ever be famous?" My fortune, given me by a mechanical lion dancer bobbing and weaving and cackling in glee, read; Chukichi, or Moderately Auspicious.

Hip-hop you don't stop. You don't stop.

I'm at this club Face where Ritsuko's mates Tada (Dr Peterson) and Hiro (Language Mic) are DJing and suddenly these two freestylers start asking me questions in RAP. Japanese Rap at that.

watashi wa nippon, namae ja nai
anata wa doko, bokutachi kikitai

[I am Japan, it's not my name
Where are you, we want to know]

This was all a bit too much in the heat and noise and smoke, and so I splutter around my beer:

ore wa lance
[I am Lance]

Which was heard as [I am France]

So I am answering questions about French culture for the next 30 minutes. Fun!

---

sickness of snakes. sleepless. lauren's b'day. troy and his stds. painless. red. sleet. underbar. early morning denny's. beck. mexican religious art. key largo. peppered steak. the prose edda. blood of the iron fist. failed keizai. aquarium. kingsblood. just good friends.

We're Not Alone!!!

2005-01-26T22:53:00.000+09:00

Now I have two (count 'em -- 2!!) Friends In Blog. A veritable army. We could take on the world, if it was smaller and had less people on it. In it?

Not much else to say, really. Read Rob's shit. It's funny. Kinda. And all those pictures he talks about?? They're real. Really.

I'm planning to buy a digital projector this week. Am I getting too home-theatery? I'm studying my ass off for the level 2 Japanese test. My girlfriend, who is a native speaker of the language, struggles to answer the questions on this fucker.

Started an play-by-mail Call of Cthulhu campaign with a bunch of friends scattered across the globe. Momma I'm scared! I play a 42 year-old Morrocan truckie/former gun-runner and I look like Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas. That's the scary bit.

On another note, my friend Wendy in Italy was recently told to be careful of people claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary because some of the stories are not actually true.

Unlike THIS, which is totally genuine (they guarantee it, see!)

Splattered rice and a drift to the Right...

2005-01-13T23:58:00.000+09:00

A little while since the last post here.

Work has begun again full swing, but my Uni classes have gone into their exam period so I get to play World of Warcraft instead. Tauren druids are fun.

Last weekend I made Mochi with Mizuki and a bunch of her friends from the mountain climbing club of her college. Event organised by the always supergenki Emiko. It was fun beating little rice grains to a pasty death on a clearblue icy day.

Damn it's cold.

OK - Rant Mode On

I am reading Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and it's fascinating. The complexities of what the Americans did here during the occupation astounds me. The way they 'set up' the Emperor as a British-style powerless figurehead as a way of manipulating the hearts and minds of the Japanese people...I am constantly reminded how 'set up' this entire country is.

But things are really changing. Everything from Koizumi's Yasukuni visits to the SDF's forays into Iraq...this year is the 60th anniversary of the end of WW2 and the demilitarization of Japan, and it seems the country is on the verge of some kind of major seachange. I was talking to an old lady today who had seen Michael Moore's film Farenheit 911 and I guess wanted to talk to a foreigner about it. She said with a pained expression on her face "It seems old men like to make wars for young men to die in." The phrase really stuck with me all day.

Just today a minor scandal broke in the papers about a government minister interfering with a national broadcaster and attempting to censor a documentary on the war crimes of the Showa Emperor. Everywhere I go I hear stuff about how Japan must "regain it's sense of national pride" or "reassert itself as a major international power" and this kind of rhetoric. To me this kind of talk is disturbing and a little saddening. But people will deny that any kind of right-wing shift is taking place, despite the clear warning signs. This shift I think is occurring at a global level.

As a teacher who sometimes works in public schools, I have to deal with another hot topic: the Tokyo state governments introduction of compulsory singing of the National Anthem and bowing to the Rising Sun flag at the beginning of each school day. Large numbers of teachers protested this and even striked last year, leading to retributive punishment from the Ministry of Education in the form of pay cuts and even terminations. The big twist came near the end of the year when a conservative politician asked the current Emperor at a press conference what he thought about it and the Emperor said he thought it was a bad idea to force students to be patriotic. This kind of threw the right-wingers (who continue to worship the Emperor as a divine being) for a spin.

Whatever...Rant Mode Off

Chichibu

2005-01-01T01:54:00.001+09:00

The snow was deep yesterday. Thought I'd write about my Christmas trip to the mountains.

Mizuki and I took an early express train to Chichibu on the morning of the 24th. Chichibu is a town in western Saitama prefecture, about 1.5 hours north-westish of Tokyo. Saitama is often known as "the New Jersey of Japan." It's close to a great city. It's a suburban commuter area. And it's profoundly unfashionable. Adding the syllable Da- to its name gives you Dasai-tama, or Unfashionable Ball. Don't ever mention this to people who live there, though. The only cool thing about Saitama is the Saitama Super Arena, where major sporting events are held (including the year-ending Otoko Matsuri (Man Festival) on Dec. 31 where lots of big scary dudes from around the world beat the living bejeezus out of eachother in a square-shaped ring. Oh yeah and the Urawa Reds, who are apparently a good football team (don't ask me; I just teach them English.)

So anyway, we went Inaka (Beyond the Black Stump.) Out in the sticks in the uncoolest place in the country. Why, you may ask? Why oh why oh why?

Two reasons, and good ones:
God and Hot Springs.

Goddess in fact. In Chichibu there are a series of 34 temples dedicated to the Buddhist deity Kannon (Kwan Yin in Mandarin Chinese.) There used to be 33, which is a holy number, the soul spending 33 years in limbo before transmigrating to a new incarnation, but then this group hooked up with two others (in Kyoto and Wakayama, I believe) and added an extra to give a total of 100. Thems a lotta temples. Kannon is a Bodhisattva, an enlightened soul who has forgone the bliss of ascending to nirvana in order to help all other souls find their way thenceward. She is the goddess of Mercy and Childbirth. One of the temples we visited (perhaps number 6 or 7; I can't recall) actually has a strikingly out-of-place and Madonna-like statue of her holding a small child to her breast. It is thought that this statue, donated by a rich noble in the Edo period, was secretly crafted by an underground Christian group and surrepetitiously 'smuggled in.' Christianity was outlawed by the Shogunate of the time. Kannon is quite beautiful. She has a serene face, and sad eyes, filled with compassion for the sufferings of the world. But my deepest and most lasting impression of Kannon comes from the Sakai Masaaki TV show from the 70s: Monkey! She saves his hairy pink ass on many an occasion.

So we hiked around to all these temples, and our feet got REALLY sore. Up mountains and down valleys, past schoolyards and cement factories, disused warehouses, quaint cottages, gutters full of toxic slime, railyards, traditional inns, decorative glass-blowing manufacturers, five hundred year-old olive trees, maples, a forest of cedars and soba restaurant after soba restaurant (a local specialty, apparently.) At each temple we entered, we stopped to make an small offering and a prayer, surveyed the grounds and architecture, then had a chat with the monk on duty. While we talked he would, in beautiful ink-brush calligraphy, inscribe our books with the temple name, date, and a poem.

The days were short, so we retired early as soon as the sun dropped behind the looming peaks to the west. And then onto the onsennatural hot springs, the only other reason to come to Chichibu in winter. The hot springs were hot and springy, which is to say, just the way they're supposed to be. Which is a good thing. Really. And anyway, greatly relaxing after a day-long pilgrimage in the freezing December air. Scalding hot milky white water and steam so thick it feels like you're drinking when you breathe. We had roast chicken and salad and vodka for Christmas dinner (no turkeys out in rural Japan I'm afraid,) surveying the mountains and icy river below our hilltop ryokan inn.

One last thing about this town. It is dominated by a mountain. Buko-san. Quite an impressive monster. It looms so hugely on the sky that you cannot help but feel its presence at all times. It casts a long shadow over the valley. In times past the people of the Chichibu valley had two major gods: the god of the mountain, a male spirit; and the god of the dark wood in the center of the valley, a female deity. At the famous Yomatsuri (Night Festival) on Dec. 2nd each year the god of Buko-san would descend from his mountain seat in the form of the head priest's ceremonial staff, make a procession to the shrine in the center of the sacred wood, and meet his bride. The staff would be ritually placed in a hollow on the back of a turtle-statue to complete the symbolic union. This ritual continues to be practiced today, and the staff and the turtle are still there.

However....

Buko-san is destroyed. After the 2nd World War Chichibu, like all small communities in Japan, was pressed to find some kind of industry to help the economic recovery of the nation. It was found that Buko-san, the seat of the god, was largely made from limestone and stone perfect for the manufacture of cement, so prized by the state-supported (to this day) construction industry. So the mountain was cut down. I shit you not. I have never seen anything like it before in my life. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the top of the mountain is gone. Just cut out. The scar is quite plain to see. Most of the mountain is stripped bare of trees. Great tiers of grey stone can be seen from tens of kilometres away. It is a vast ugliness, a scar beyond reckoning.

So the question I have is: how does this psychologically affect the people who live in the shadow of this mountain, their own god whom they ravaged and destroyed in the name of industrialization? Every day, every minute, the corpse of this decapitated god looms on the edge of the valley, his body broken and torn. Shinto is a religion deeply connected with nature, and the Japanese people will tell you that they are deeply respectful of the gods of the natural world. I fear the shadow that lies over this valley. The murder of a god is not without consequences.

Pepper, briefly; The Field of Autumn Leaves and pubic hair

2004-12-17T22:04:00.000+09:00

so i was talking to Paul C the other night on msn and got R. Lee's script for pepper. very nice. Michael Palin would have been great. loved the cat/milkman thang. and Pete Townshend.

P.S. Rorschach Publishing should be renamed Raw Shark Publishing, for bonus geek watchmen obscurity points.

---

on a unrelated note, i can't buy World Of Warcraft in Japan, which is shitting me to tears. i spent two hours after work today hunting through the nightmare otaku cat-piss land of Akihabara ('Field of Autumn Leaves') for the fucking game. no luck. the US amazon won't ship video games to Japan apparently, and amazon.co.jp doesn't have it in stock (yet?) arg. i'm a consumer, goddamnit! i want to consume! let me consume! i did manage to see a genuine Japanese albino otaku girl skulking around the shojo racks, though, so the trip may have been worth it after all.

had nice shio ramen with Mizuki tonight. she is prepping for her final practical test of fourth year medicine this coming sunday. next year she starts her internship and has to cut people up and shit. lovely.

--a note on Japanese RPGing. totally obscure here, in the table-top, paper-and-pencil form. so obscure that in an area the size of greater Tokyo, with roughly 20 million people, there are only 2 shops of any size catering to the hobby. entering one of these (the Yellow Submarines in Shinjuku and Akihabara), i get the feeling i'm diving into some deep, dark core of deviant niche weirdness. the people in these places are quite a few notches higher on the nerd/geek scale than those found in shops in western countries. Or maybe not.

my mate Rob B. told me a story once of a trip to gallery opening of some kind (he does commerical art-fuck shit like redesigning the monkey character Monchichi to have disturbing, bloodshot staring human eyes -- digital images of Rob's own) where he met some porn startlet who was signing her photobooks for fans. Rob got one, and included was a complimentary pubic hair in a tiny plastic bag taped to the book. what a freebie! anway, that's the kind of place Akihabara is.

enough, work tomorrow.

we gather to forget the past year, x 3

2004-12-14T23:01:00.000+09:00

Last week was a goddamned trial. Penultimate and all I guess it should be expected. Thursday night, Bounenkai with the Ikebukuro crew, minus Mari who was sick which is a shame as she usually manages to create some kind of havoc. David turned up and regaled us with tales of his new dream-job in Hakone. 5 and a half months paid vacation a year the MOTHERFUCKER! :)

Friday night saw a dinner party at Ryan and Miki's, with Graf, Sarah and Mizuki in attendance. Lots of geek talk and good Mexican-Japanese hybrid cooking. Sarah it turns out is a poet who won first prize in a national tanka contest (this?) year. Mizuki and I had a slightly weird experience on the quaint tram ride back when an old man angrily demanded we not sit in the priority seating despite the fact that there was almost no-one else in the carriage.

Saturday and Mia-sensei collapsed unconscious in the teacher's office at Omiya-ko. She came to her senses after a few seconds, but just lay on the floor for 2 hours and refused any help and demanded that no-one call a doctor. Very weird.

Saturday night saw another Bounenkai in Omiya with my business classes headed by the irrepressible Jim. Small talk and shochu. Lots of shochu. High points included the announcement of Saiko's engagement, talking with Harumi about law school, which kind of cleared things up a bit in my own head, and a parting conversation with a medical researcher about the human nervous system. I managed to get the last train back and collapse in exhaustion.

Sunday Mizuki and I went skating in Edogawa-ku. It was great fun, I think my first time (if I did it as a child I can't remember the experience) and I found that I had a kind of natural talent for it. After the first 10 minutes or so of teetering about uncertainly and flailing and scrabbling at the wall for support, I was soon off and racing around the main rink at a reasonable pace. Mizuki fared less well, and after a couple of hours, she slipped and smacked her cheek on the ice, which called an end to proceedings. We tried to take a bus home, got stuck in a traffic jam behind a road accident, and finally got out and walked to a subway station. That night we watched the Woody Allen film Everybody Says I Love You which was quite excellent, though lighter in tone than what I usually enjoy from him.

Also saw Kubrick's Barry Lyndon which was beautiful and grand.

I have started two painting projects:

the first being my idealized impressions of the Australian destert landscapes I remember so vividly from childhood. Crumbling ochre and rust reds, hot black ironstone, poison spinifex, twisted old mallee trees, fragrant sandalwood, the blue sky empty and comforting. Perhaps the odd road, a broken wire-and-post fenceline, a decrepit windmill and corrugated tank, paddy melons exploding in the sun, the goannas and cockatoos and black trap-door spiders. Perhaps a distant plume of smoke like the line of drunken painter's brush, cutting across the azure plain.

the second being images of the urban residental districts Tokyo, in particular the old-style shitamachi towns which have been swamped and twisted by more recent architectural pestilences. Narrow crooked sakamichi (steeply-sloping alleys) overgrown with potted-plant jungles and tangled nests of cables wires poles and god knows what else. In these places, you're lucky if the sky is a narrow strip of blue: a glipse into an unreachable dream world of sun and space.

Recently I am reading Bob Dylan's new autobiography, which is even better than I could have hoped, Jack Vance's early stories, and I'm about to start a biography of Django Reinhardt. Just waiting for the Christmas break to begin....

train groping: the national pastime

2004-12-01T23:00:00.000+09:00

Tan-tan Men for dinner...gooooood.....

The other Saturday night with Junko and crew at the Red Dragonfly contained an interesting conversation about chikan, or 'train molestation', that most Japanese of perversions. Apparently all 4 of the women present had been attacked, a total of about 100 times between them. Their complaints had an air of resigned frustration. A total of zero offences were reported to the authorities. The 4 Japanese men present (all in their late 30s or 40s) expressed attitudes ranging from shouganai (oh well; can't be helped) to kanchigau (you're misinterpreting things.) The two gaijin (myself included) were...outraged is too strong a word, but it's getting close.

What the fuck is up with that shit!?!

Anyway, the last week was pretty quiet. I went shopping in Koenji on Sunday. Bought an old Pulp album (His N Hers) for 300 yen, some cards, a new mouse, and had a great Thai lunch. Mizuki has a plan to go skating. Tomorrow I want to buy an easel at Hands. I'm sick of painting on the floor.

Howl, a UFO, Gingko leaves, hundreds of men all sporting the moustache of the Emperor

2004-11-27T22:18:00.000+09:00

Saw it! Very good, even Kimura. Tokyo Tower was beautiful in the dying light. We thought we saw a UFO. Passed some true architectural oddities on the way there, including the Tokyo Masonic Lodge and a red-bricked cylindrical tower with no doors. Tuesday was the Icho Matsuri. German sausages, Sanuki Udon and Beer. And the Meiji Emperor's memorial museum. Alternate histories. Watched Mystic River. I am not sure the ending really works. Looping guitar lines spiral through my room. I bought an RC-20XL. 16 minutes!

Here's a story I wrote in about 1 hour Monday night. The challenge from Misaki; 3 kanji; 矢、木、真珠。 Arrow, Tree, Pearl.

Hatsumode

On January 1st I was alone. In the morning I woke early; perhaps 4am, it was still black outside. I ran a hot bath and scrubbed myself clean of the night sweat soaking my sleeping robe. An old crumbly bar of yellow soap, scented with eucalyptus. The water was steaming; I filled the cypress bucket and poured it over my aching shoulders. I shaved in the cracked, steamed-up mirror glued to the concrete wall. Cut my neck, let the blood run down the drain in a crimson spiral. I dressed in a warm wool robe, carnadine orange, with a wide black sash. I took my knife, and my grass-tree staff, and my wool hat from beside the door.

Outside the wind was bitter as I made my way to the little shrine behind the house. I passed by the old street man’s leaning shack. Even he wasn’t up yet. Very quiet. My wooden shoes on the bitumen, the distant crowing of a cock. Just me and a few ugly old crows, hopping around the garbage piles and glaring at me sideways. Down the alley smothered in pot-plants, a turn right at the stone wall of the tiny graveyard, and then the stone steps of the shrine before me. No one here yet. Perhaps I am the first of the year. As I slowly clattered up, the stone guardian dogs seemed to howl as the north wind blew a flurry of long-dead pale leaves and urban debris in a vortex to carry me through the gate the color of my robe, of my blood.

At the fountain I washed my hands in the ice water spewing from the corroded bronze dragon’s mouth. The water a little pink as the warm blood from my neck trickled down through my sleeve. I touched the red-green water to my lips, blood-rust and verdigris.

I bowed to the ancient cedar girded in the white rope as thick as my thigh, then turned to the tiny building at the far end of the yard. Approaching with my clattering shoes, a cloud of diseased pigeons exploded, then blew away like smoke. I tossed a coin the same color as the dragon into the offerings-box, and gripping the rope, this one black as coal, shaking the bell, I prayed. To the god of War. The dove is his messenger. With blood in the soil, the crops grow tall and golden.

One old man stirred nearby in a small out-building. “Happy New Year,” he growled in a voice like that of an ancient toad recently woken from countless years under the mud. I approached and said “How many of these New Years for you, then, father?” He just grunted as if to say “more than enough” and gestured at the wares spread out on the table before him. A few assorted charms, talismans, wards, amulets, tokens and postcards. A fairly paltry collection to ward against bad luck, or jealousy, or demons, to bring wealth and fortune and love and children; to past tests, to win promotion, to hit the jackpot. “I need something stronger.” I said, indicating the wall behind him with the staff in my hand.

He glanced up at me for a moment, then with a sigh heaved his old bones off his stool and moved to the wall. It was covered in arrows, white and red, tasseled and bound with charms and wardings strong enough to bind and imprison the terrors of the world.

“Whatcha tryina kill?” He grunted.
I said “My love.”

He paused for a long moment, then turned back to me. “Your love?”
“An old love.” I said. “It won’t die.”
“By all the gods, son, that’s a tough one. That kind of thing don’t die easy, you know.”
“I know. I came to the god of war, of death and new life. Where else could I turn?”
“Hmmm.” His eyes became vacant. “OK. Wait. There.” He said, indicating the place where I was already standing.
He slowly made his way off to the main shrine building, entering through a side door I hadn’t noticed before. I followed him with my eyes. The pigeons had returned, were pecking around the sandy yard. I thought “what on earth can they find to eat there?” and then the side door swung open and the old man trudged back to the shop, grumbling all the way, carrying with some difficulty a long, flat box of dark wood.

He cleared a space on the table and gently clacked the box down. The sound was heavy. “Here you go.” He said. “This be what you need.” And he opened the box. Inside, on a bed of old crimson silk, lay a white wooden arrow, a full 3 feet long and with a vein of orange-red spiralling like the blood in my shower from one end to the other. Three feathers, white, red and black. The arrowhead a sharpened milky-white stone, viscous and cold in the early morning light.

“This is mother-of-pearl.” He gestured to the arrow. I wasn’t sure if he meant the arrowhead or the whole thing. “Is that its name?” I whispered, reaching to pick it up. He ignored me and continued, easing himself back onto his stool. “Used to kill love. There’s an old story that goes with this.”

He took out a slightly bent cigarette from a crumpled packet of Parliaments and offered me one. I shook my head slightly. He lit up and continued:
“Once upon a time there was a Lady of the court in this city, who fell in love with a Soldier, and he fell in love with she. Of course they couldn’t marry because her father wouldn’t allow it, but the soldier was a great warrior, filled with a burning passion and a fiery anger, and always and forever he sought to win fame and reknown. From a hundred bloody campaigns he returned victor, and eventually he rose, through feats both brave and barbarous, to a position of power, close to the local Lord. The two lovers had met in secret for years, but finally the Soldier was granted land and title, and the Lady waited eagerly for his proposal, practicing everyday her courtly archery, as was her wont. But the proposal never came, and the Soldier-Lord moved on, marrying a Princess from a foreign land carrying his rage over the seas. The Lady was shattered, and crafted this arrow in secret. From the ash-wood of her dowry-chest she cut the shaft, from a pearl stolen from a sea dragon’s treasure-room she honed the head, and the feathers she plucked from the three birds of the gods, necks cut in ritual before dawn beside the sea: dove, rooster, and raven. Then one day, standing in the very place you are standing now, she shot the arrow far into the air, as high as it would go, and it nigh disappeared into the sun. But down it came, the arrow, at the exact same spot she was standing, and struck her clean through the breast, and she was no more. And so you see this arrow is the killer of old loves which will not die.”

I looked down for a moment at the spot I was standing on. Under my foot, stuck to the bottom of my clog, was the wrapper of a candy bar. I looked up and said, with a dead face, “How much?”

The old man smiled, and as he did so, his eyes disappeared into his mirth.

You aint worth the blood that runs in your veins

2004-11-18T13:45:00.000+09:00

It's 1 o'clock. I have work in a few hours.

Recently fascinated with Intellectual Property law, of all things. I teach a private class to a lawyer, Ms. Chie, every other Thursday. She is currently involved in defending a female stalker who is pathologically obsessed with the local 'Kuroneko Takkyubin' delivery truck man. She buys shit just so he will visit. She follows him around on her bicycle and memorizes his routes. Chie is more interested in IP, however. We are currently looking at articles about the patenting of GM crops being sold/pushed on Iraqi farmers by American corporations. Fascinating. How can you patent something which by its very nature is a replicator. That is, the thing itself violates the patent, creates new copies, blows away in the wind and ends up on someone else's property. The seeds are illegal to own, the farmers have to destroy them after each harvest. We're also looking at media IP law, and next week I have chosen an interesting Wired interview with Jeff Tweedy from the band Wilco to kick off the lesson. "Music is not a Loaf of Bread."

All this has sparked a desire in me recently to pursue a legal career. A sudden thing. The more I think about the ideas I wrestled with during my undergraduate degree - in particular the intersection of art and postmodernity - the more I begin to think about Law. That is, in the legal field there exists a practical realisation of some of the theoretical issues I was and am so passionately interested in. So now I am looking at law schools in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere. My first thoughts: I need a lot more money.

This morning I spent doing laundry, visiting the dermatologist as I do once a month, and playing old Dylan songs on my beat-up acoustic. I have tickets to see Howl this coming Monday with Misaki. On Saturday I'm going to Akatombo with Junko and all that crew. Noel said he'd come too. Then Tuesday I promised to go to some festival in Aoyama with Mizuki. Meanwhile I have student counselling reports to write, I have to deal with this weird mother who hits her 2-year-old daughter before class and insists we treat the child 'as you would an adult,' and prepare for my University classes on Friday morning.

PS. I love Firefox. A few minor quibbles (such as no right-click options to change text encoding) but otherwise excellent.

Walking behind the Red Sea

2004-11-13T22:02:00.000+09:00

It was my birth-day the other. 26. Fuck!

Mizuki took me out for dinner that night after work. Tried to find a restaurant called Ko-Ke-Kokko (the sound of a Japanese chicken,) but it was out of business. Just a dark pit in the ground. Really. So instead we tried Torigen which was suitably dingy and relatively inexpensive yakitori.

A few days before I had met with Misaki and talked about this comic for a few hours, sitting in a school built in 1921 and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Jiyugakuen Myonichikan. A quiet, beautiful building. It reminded me of Edwardian Australian schoolhouses, all polished wood and hard chairs and real slate blackboards. I felt transported back to country WA for a few hours. The light was beautiful and we got coffee with free fruit cake and cookies! Yeah!

A fascinating mural in the main hall was uncovered recently underneath the plaster. Painted by the students, a bible scene from Exodus: 13. A column of fire precedes the march of the Israelites towards/into the Red Sea. Hebraic writing tops the mural, presumably a quotation. I was struck by the oddness of the picture's construction: the sky/sea cuts into the land and the human figures walk behind it. Proto-cubism by Japanese schoolgirls?

Hauru no Ugoku Shiro opens next Saturday: shall not miss...

Thinking about Law...

Karasu, Hato, Suzume

2004-11-08T21:44:00.000+09:00

a whole boxload of Jose Saramago books arrived this morning.

[don't know how to make the accent on the e. sorry dude.]

3 whiskeys later and i'm about ready to read them.

winter is gnawing at the doorstep. listening to Wu-Tang riding to Yoyogi, i was cold. and in the park, the fountains were like ice. the fall leaves beautiful and full of regret.

tomorrow morning i am meeting misaki to work on a comic. here's the full text, minus scene desriptions:

***
"Boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence." Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World.

8. One day in fall, I found a crow with a broken wing in the garden.
11. One day, your owner will come looking for you. I'll keep you safe.
15. Have you seen a crow? / I don't know.
16. Why do you hide your face? What happened to your eye?
19. Each full moon my bird gouges out this eye with his beak-
20. and each full moon I break his wing anew. Give me him so I may break him and him me.
22. Why do you do such terrible things to eachother?
23. Because this is who we are. We cannot be other than we are.
24. Don't you want to see? Doesn't the bird want to fly?
25. I doesn't matter what we want. We are.
26. I don't believe you! You must stop!
27. If we stopped, we would have no reason to touch eachother. It is better that we continue; we would be bored otherwise.
28...
>Change is good. Everything changes in time.
-I don't know...all the great changes in my life have felt somehow external to myself, as though instituted by another's hand.
>This sounds like a poor excuse to avoid responsibility. A manifesto of laziness.
-Maybe I can't escape my laziness. Maybe laziness is the unconscious recognition of futility in the face of a deterministic universe...
>Bah!
---
-But you see I don't want to change. I don't want to spend the energy to change. I am subject to inertia. Comfort is a heavy thing. It weights at me.
A)Push yourself! Go out into the cold!
B)No, stay where it's safe and warm.
-I want to be left alone without these wonderings.
-It's like a trance, our routine, we fall in circles like the moon falls about the Earth.
>But even this will change. The moon will one day plunge into the sea and be gone.
-And I shall not be here to see it. For me, infinity is bounded by my birth and my death. Parentheses arc across my horizons.
>Your children's children will see the fall of the moon.
-My children's children shall not be human.
>Aye, children today are not what they once were.
---
>To change, perhaps, you need to die and be reborn. A new page, a new word, a new spot of ink.
>Things are dying and rebirthing infinitely each moment.
-Yes. Humans like to partition their world. The alternative is madness.
>So to change this behavior, you must visualise a line and step across it.
-You sound like a pop psychologist.
>Well, you can't change if you don't want to.
-On the contrary, things change just when you don't want them to.
>Pessimism. Perhaps unconsciously...
-What if there is no unconscious? My mind just crystals reflecting the changing light? No interiors. All dimensions unfolded, the world is flat, a line, a point. There is nothing inside.
>Nihilism.
-Jargon.

29.Bah! I've had enough! Go away!
***

Not exactly a barrel of laughs. Frame 28 will be printed in microscopic type.

...and 2 cactii

2004-11-07T00:46:00.000+09:00

Tonight was Graf's housewarming in Ebisu. Unfortunately I didn't get much of a chance to speak to the man himself. But...
I had an extended conversation about linguistics or something on the train with law-schooling Ryan while okusan Miki sat bored and polite.
Nick likes Jack Vance and Steely Dan. The Dying Earth. Aja.
A girl who buys art films from Europe and South America for tiny Japanese theatres. Cool. Chi to Hone mitai!
A girl from Oberlin who favors Obama in 2008 and Argentinian men anytime.
A girl from Auckland who told great stories about being bitten by rabid monkeys and one beggar (on the ankle stepping out of a taxi) in India.
Yuusuke informed me that High Contrast is huge in Japan and insisted on some serious d&b clubbing over the winter.

again

2004-11-06T01:08:00.000+09:00

again, again,

it begins again.