parataxis

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

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

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."

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

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

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

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

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

666

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


INTERSTICES

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

IMAGES OF DICE

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

And from this The Avatar.

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

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

Three sixes.

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

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

simple electronics; nostalgia; the game of life

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

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

10^(7.49x10^48)

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

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

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

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

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

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

notes from a teacher training meeting

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

shoben yokocho

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

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