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.

sandstorm

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

(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

Totally serious. No sarcasm here at all.

night maras...

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

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.