a lovely hand truck/dolly, with nice wheels, MADE IN USA a pink wire frame canopy dogbed (?!?) a wrought iron plant stand w/ bonus cup/watering can holder
Things I skipped, because I no longer (alas, alack!) have a CRX that could fit a coffin:
a kayak, one big piece of plastic a little boat, about as big as the kayak, but more like a sailless sailboat
Please enjoy my 2009 music wrap-up. I'm slacking this year: no mixtape, no micro-reviews. However, it is a list of 40 fantastic albums that I advise you to acquire at your early convenience.
at this point, it's just me, Mr. Moore, and Tyler, who is of the aforementioned "in kindergarten when i graduated" category, and Tyler and i trade tales of how much Mr. Moore influenced us, between Mr. Moore telling stories about how students influenced him, in a kind of roundabout way. and those are the tales i set out to tell you tonight, as they seemed so momentous and, well, influential, even as i drove home soberly. but when i got home last night i couldn't bring myself to write any of them. one reason was that i was feeling tired and less articulate. a better reason was that i was afraid they wouldn't stand up to retelling, that they were "you had to be there" moments. but now on an airplane alone and surrounded by strangers, i feel up to giving the retelling another try. so bear with me and accept my apologies if they don't hold up, because at this point i have to get them down, and out. for me if not you.
the one that i retold a few times last night was that Moore, despite, i think, never being my teacher (maybe for a quarter or two, instead of PE, but never as a full-year class with a grade that really mattered academically), left me with a concise and frequently useful lesson. he had an...annoying and endearing habit of going ballistic once per production (for that was all drama class was--the rehearsal, setup, and staging of productions on stage and open to the public). just bawling us out for something we frequently didn't understand. and the memorable one was a show where i was the quasi-lead (it was not a play with a clear leading role, but i was on stage for almost the whole time. the lottery, and i was the mayor, for those who might care) anyway, after dress rehearsal, he sat us down in the audience seats, and got on stage, and just harangued us. "there is one person in this room with a reasonable, a worthwhile, a usable and acceptable amount of ENERGY. and he is talking right now." it's true--our energy was not on display that night. and so we all (i really do think, all of us) reached inside and found more energy. maybe not the amount he was hoping for, but enough. and that production went off pretty well. the lesson i took away was that when my audience (be it me or many), sometimes, just really believing and feeling and then ACTING that belief would impart enough energy to the process of whatever i was doing to make it engaging and interesting. sometimes that turns out not to work, or i can't just *snap* summon the energy. but i have another tool in the toolbox for turning a situation that isn't working into one that does.
the one that i heard from Mr. Moore is that he did what he thought was best despite what other teachers/administrators thought, and it seemed to work by and large for his students--i didn't meet a single boring person there last night. people with boring jobs (hey, like me!), sure, but the people were real, sincere, feeling, and caring. and Moore wasn't the only cause. but he was definitely a big part. a part that stuck with everyone there, unlike, say my well-meaning and nice and good spanish teachers, say. or one terrible english teacher, who failed to serve even as a good counterexample to a good life somehow.
the one i heard from Tyler is that Moore pushed him and he ended up doing what he loves (well, for now).
wish I could find something more profound to say. but i think that'll do for now.
thanks, Mr. Moore, and a cast of hundreds (thousands?) from his tenure at TVS.
Yes we are blok heads! Hisae and I will board a bullet train to Osaka on Wednesday and spend three weeks at points south, mostly Kansai, so our Tokyo time is drawing to a close, alas. Most of the precious substance of the last three weeks has barely made it into these pages; the research I've been doing for the Aftergold show, the daily meetings I've had with friends, old and new.
Last night's Unreliable Tour Guide performance at NOW IDeA was shamanic fun; I turned artist Yusuke Mashiba's (very nice, outsider-ish) ink drawings into the gods of a parallel universe, and also interviewed the artist, posing questions like: "Would I find a black carton of black milk in your fridge?" and "Are you jealous of cockroaches?"
Another high point came on Saturday night, when we went to see excellent absurdist theatre group Crack Iron Albatrossoket at SuperDeluxe. Their piece, entitled Yojohan Oasis Rocket, ended with a blistering live performance from Oorutaichi, whose set with choreographer-dancer Masako Yasumoto in the Spectacle in the Farm video projected last week at Vacant was one of the most thrilling and inspiring things I've ever seen.
For me, the filament of life burns more brightly and beautifully in Tokyo than anywhere else; the question almost everybody asks me is: "Why not live here?" I've run out of reasons, so I'll just say (an Albatrossoket motto) BECAUSE WE ARE BLOK HEADS!
The sheer amount energy generated is difficult to comprehend. Although the crust probably shifted by only a centimeter, the incredible density and gravity made that a violent event well beyond anything we mere humans have experienced. The blast of energy surged away from the magnetar, out into the galaxy. In just a fifth of a second, the eruption gave off as much energy as the Sun does in a quarter of a million years.
Oh, and did I mention this magnetar is 50,000 light years away? No? That's 300 quadrillion miles away, about halfway across the freaking Milky Way galaxy itself!
And yet, even at that mind-crushing distance, it fried satellites and physically affected the Earth. It was so bright some satellites actually saw it reflected off the surface of the Moon! I'll note that a supernova, the explosion of an entire star, has a hard time producing any physical effect on the Earth if it's farther away than, say, 100 light years. Even a gamma-ray burst can only do any damage if it's closer than 8000 light years or so.
Absent without leaving The greater Tokyo area has just under 36 million people living in it; it's still the world's most populous metropolitan area. If this monster of cities runs remarkably smoothly most of the time, and even feels like a rather relaxing place, it's because of the particular, even peculiar, habitus of presence which prevails here. Tokyo people are very good at being absent without leaving.
Tokyo's inhabitants, especially in their transitions on public transport, maintain a minimum degree of presence. Crushed against each other or spread out on seats, with lowered eyes and the virtual escape-environments of books, newspapers and electronic gadgets, they're there but not there. They're (it's Howard Devoto's phrase) absent without leaving.
A certain amount of discretion and self-minimisation exists amongst commuters all over the world, of course. But the Japanese are more discreet, and minimise themselves more politely and considerately than anyone else I know. Even their houses seem to avert their gaze; you can pass down a heavily-built Tokyo street with the sense of being completely unobserved, thanks to the frosted glass in the windows, just as you can sit in a crowded train carriage and not find a single eye meeting yours. It can feel uncanny at times, like being an invisible man. Most of the time it's very reassuring, though. You soon miss it in other cities.
Adjectives I'd use to describe this minimised public presence: discreet, considerate, polite, apologetic, cold, withdrawn, inward, socialised, repressed. And there we begin to hit on an interesting paradox: you withdraw into yourself in the interests of the collectivity. Your absence is highly social, even when it resembles a semi-autistic withdrawal. You turn inward to facilitate outward smoothness. You make yourself ghostlike out of courtesy to other people, who do the same.
When you get to your destination, of course, the sublimation and repression can stop. You can suddenly elevate your presence, like the glum silent queuer finally reaching the nightclub, checking his coat, greeting his friends, ordering a drink. What's the maximum degree of presence? Perhaps being a celebrity would represent that: a celeb is a super-individual, someone whose mere presence makes our day, our month and our year. Quick, take a photo! The celeb is being asked his view on this and that, and listened to respectfully. The celeb has engineered his life so that there's no dead time, no self-repression. Like a Romantic poet, we imagine his life filled with moments of maximal intensity. We wish our lives were like that.
The other person like that, weirdly enough, is the madman or homeless person, who lives completely in the moment because he uses the spaces of transition as his places of residence. The street or the train is the homeless person's destination; no need to sublimate, save up intensity for later. This is it; grumble, chatter, joust, laugh, be yourself, right here on the street, right here on the train! It doesn't matter! You're going nowhere! You're mad and you're homeless! The obligation to be self-effacing and considerate doesn't apply to you! Be intense! Live in the moment! Make every second count!
For the rest of us, though, self-repression is a daily fact of life. Especially in conditions of urban density; we could say that density and intensity are at odds. The more dense the urban conditions, the less intense we want people to be as they transition through public space, the more ghostlike we require each other to be. Don't talk on your cellphone! I know it makes you feel like a celebrity, feel more alive and intense, but please don't do it! What if we were all celebrities in this carriage? What if all 36 million of us in this city were super-intense individuals at every moment! What a nightmare! Let's all stay ghosts, please, at least until we reach our destination!
Japan being Japan, of course, has developed aesthetics of non-presence, turning something negative into something positive with its own etiquette and its own subtle beauty, and giving non-presence a sort of presence. Iki describes something muted, sombre, restrained, apparently-unselfconscious, half turned-away, "an aesthetics of the back, of the nape of the neck. It can't be face-to-face. It's an aesthetic of obliqueness and peripheries which avoids focus and despises intellectual analysis". A woman whose seductiveness has an iki quality would, paradoxically, turn her turning-away towards you as she dropped her gaze and revealed her back, her shoulder, the nape of her neck. An absence becomes a presence; it's something I see enacted by women on Tokyo trains every day.
A related aesthetic might be Naoto Fukusawa's idea of the super normal; self-effacing, slightly bland goods that blend comfortably with others are better than loud, flashy, unique, individualistic goods. "Super normal design means design which, instead of trying to stand out by making a statement or being "stimulating", blends into the background, becoming unobtrusive but indispensable."
You might seek maximum intensity in an affair with a lover, perhaps, but smooth, unobtrusive consideration in a longterm relationship with a spouse; the perfect spousal togetherness might approach a discreet, doubled aloneness, whereas the perfect affair intensity would be the unbearable tangle of two celebrities, two Romantic poets, or two mad homeless people.
At the tragic end of intensity is the individual who becomes intolerable when his quirks get amplified by too much attention: "everyone loves you until they know you," as John Lydon sang. At the tragic end of self-effacing consideration is the self which disappears and can't come back, even when the destination-requiring-presence is reached. So we get the otaku, unable to emerge from the pages of his manga, or the hikikomori, who can't even leave home in the first place, and who's taken consideration to its ultimate degree of absence: that barricaded room where the self both disappears from the world and becomes the world.
Momus appears tonight between 6 and 8pm as The Unreliable Tour Guide at Now Idea, Omote Sando.
The human body has some 10 trillion human cells -- but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing?
With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment -- which is still largely uncharacterized -- most of these rapid changes are not yet understood.
Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. "They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have," Foxman says.
i think we probably won't do double-family xmas again after the marriage--it was a pain for them to travel down here (from NYC and pittsburgh) and this was kinda a pre-marriage meetup anyhow. i wonder if this, though, is the end of our traditional xmases...which would be ok with me, because i am increasingly sour on the air travel. i love getting together with the whole family but as meredith_mccraw begins the childbearing, it's all going to change anyway so...yeah.
i guess i'm pretty blessed to have a family that i love both unconditionally but also practically, so maybe i should be sadder than i am. but i'm sure i'll still see plenty of everyone, somehow. just maybe not twice a year (thanksgiving/xmas) every year from now on. and maybe they'll come to me more, since they obviously don't mind travelling for the most part. so you know, maybe it's not antitradition but time for a new tradition of vegging out or volunteering at a soup kitchen or going skinny dipping. yeah. i'll work on that =)
in the meantime, i am very thankful for getting quality time with my quality family. i hope you got something you wanted for xmas--i have all of you and got a few nifty presents to boot. can't wait to give dark_knightly present #2 and casadedoom theirs. that's all the presents i bought this year (save for secret santa), and i'm good with that. yay less materialism & more spirit =)
I have one level covered! and that is love and belonging… I think my family and friends is the main thing that keeps me grounded and sane. I never question that I am loved…
Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.
Current Music:The Asteroids Galaxy Tour -- The Golden Age
New pod at work. Got my new seating/pod assignment earlier this week. Not where I expected, but still, I don't have to share. Yay!
The previous occupant was a slob. There were crumbs everywhere and the drawers were sticky on the outside. Nasty. I think they spilled soda on at least one occasion. Why are some people such pigs. Grrrr.
Spent quite a while cleaning. Cleaned more last night and vacuumed. It is much much nicer now. My new direct neighbor will be K----- and I've worked with him before. He's a laid back and pretty nice guy. So that's good.
It's nice to have an end pod. Room for a plant against the window. I just hope it's not too hot in the summertime.
From the most-consumerist will come the post-consumerist! Japan is a great place for a tourist to indulge in visions of alternative societies. Not only is Japan actually different in many ways from the society the tourist was brought up in, but his simple incompetence, incomprehension and sheer delirium, as he walks around Japan, will create all sorts of fertile semantic gaps which -- if no-one is on hand to explain them -- he'll fill using his imagination. His expectation of difference will make him create it.
Yesterday I was queuing for bread at a bakery on the busy plaza that leads up to Ebisu station. Perhaps the fact that it felt more like an airport than a bakery led to the vision that followed. Gazing at a sign showing the prices of different types of bread, I saw two prices. It was probably just two sizes of bread, but for a second I thought it said "WE SELL" for one price and "WE BUY" for another. I imagined, in other words, that this was a bread exchange.
From that simple "mistake" I suddenly extrapolated an alternative society, one which I find rather intriguing: a WE BUY / WE SELL, convenience/exchange, most-consumerist/post-consumerist society in which the ratio between those two prices approaches 1:1.
Clearly, elements of this society are already falling into place, and not just in Japan. Money exchanges at airports buy and sell currency. More and more cash machines will allow you to deposit as well as withdraw cash. People with solar panels on their roofs can increasingly feed excess power they generate back into the grid, and get paid for it by power companies. The technology will soon be cheap enough to make this "total power" profitable to generate at home. Who knows, people's roofs could one day displace power stations the way distributed computing and the web have displaced mainframes.
There are other examples of this eco-efficient "exchange society" taking shape. There are many secondhand clothes shops now (I think of Beacon's Closet in Brooklyn, for instance) where you have a check in counter that receives, appraises and buys clothes customers bring in, and a check out counter where customers buy clothes they didn't bring. And there's the revolution wrought by eBay, of course, and other online buying and selling mechanisms.
It gets particularly interesting when this exchange culture is blended with convenience culture, and we get a 24/7 exchange-convenience culture. For instance, say I wake up in the middle of the night thirsty. I have no cash, but I have some aluminium drinks cans I've been collecting in a bag. I take them to the can recycling machine, which gives me enough cash to buy a new drink from the drinks machine nearby. Obviously it's going to take ten or more empty cans to get the price of one full one, but it's nice to imagine ways to get that ratio lower (government subsidy to encourage the IN/OUT society, perhaps?). Achieving 1:1 would be a utopian goal, the eco-economic equivalent of building a perpetual motion machine.
Japan's convenience culture does make it a good place to entertain such visions; one of the premises of the Aftergold show I'm putting together is that the most advanced consumer society is where we're likely to see "the thing after consumerism" taking shape. The combini below my apartment here is open 24/7, 365 days a year. Most shops in Japan seem to be open at incredible times; as a European I don't at all take it for granted that I can get parts for a broken bike late on a Sunday evening, but that's exactly what we did last Sunday at about 8pm, heading to a blazing, crowded bike shop in Nishi-Shinjuku.
Japan is a country with limited natural resources, so it uses materials carefully and recycles conscientiously. Trash is graded and separated very strictly in the home. There's also a flourishing secondhand market. Shimokita has a strong Dorama-based secondhand culture, and the whole of Koenji seems to be selling used goods (including, of course, our good friends the Shiroto No Ran or "amateur revolution" crew). Bigger concerns like Book Off sell secondhand goods too. Even out in the slick Italianate shopping mall Venus Fort in Odaiba, Hisae and I found a huge and excellent secondhand clothes store (Furugi Hypermarket) selling immaculately clean clothes; the Japanese obsession with cleanliness makes secondhand here a much more pleasant -- and much less smelly -- experience than it can be in the West. And something of the same spirit infuses a place like Utrecht, which sells handmade books brought in by the artists themselves.
The unique structure of Japanese business also encourages this "amateur revolution" angle (and the exchange society I'm outlining is clearly one in which the distinction between amateur and professional gets dissolved). Even big companies like Toyota tend to employ hundreds of small household suppliers, who produce components to very high standards in little workshops on the ground floor, often, of family houses. So even companies that look vast and monolithic tend to be comprised, on closer inspection -- like a gigantic halftoned photograph -- of big numbers of small, almost amateur, suppliers.
Obviously, quality control would be a big issue in this convenience/exchange culture, especially when it comes to food (or, you know, piloting jet planes; could you get a cheaper ticket if you flew the plane for a while?). There are overlaps with my idea (most recently referenced in decade's-end music retrospectives in The Guardian by Simon Reynolds and Alexis Petridis) about everyone being famous, in the future, for fifteen people; this is very much a long-tail system of production, one which breaks down not just the distinction between amateur and professional, but also the distinctions between producer and consumer, between new and secondhand, between consuming and recycling, and between big and small-scale production.
Are any economists heralding this sort of production system at the moment? Are any political parties taking steps towards it, or putting it into their manifestos? They should be.
failure and success i look out the train window and see only a single car in the graveyard and one guy standing nearby, staring at the ground, holding a bouquet and holding himself, a still life with far more stillness than life. and i get to re-reflect on how lucky i am--nearly all of my loved ones are still with me. friends, i've lost one in my life. relatives, i've lost only the ones i don't know very well (and i am blessed with more friends and more family than the average fool..) i guess you can't be lucky forever, statistics say that my friends circle has gone too long--we're way ahead of the MTBF curve, but i'll keep hoping that shit doesn't happen. success!
inbox 172 is the best it's looked for months ande a hundred smaller than when i started working on it two hours ago, but all of those 172 deserve action, further thought, and likely some reply (some from as far in the past as 2 years ago :/). it probably speaks to something about my involvement in LJ that over a hundred of those (mostly older ones) are LJ comment threads to which i intended to reply to with some depth. i count this as a failure, but hey, i can fix it anytime, right? i can stop drinking anytime, too...
serendipity in austin meetups has been intense. i've seen a lot of folks i came to see--chicafantasma, jessimonsta, shaynabelle, missingwatch, rondanskin, meredith_mccraw and junkmenudo_rss was my first 36 hours or so, and the serendipity was finding that a long-known and little-chatted acquaintance is growing an orchard--so i stopped by with jeff between a couple of social obligations and found some encouragement for doing this whole tree-growing thing on the cheap and easy--just try a lot and stick with what works. hopefully toasthaste will help me formulate a slightly more in-depth plan.
additionally i got a bonus meeting with xomox and shubbe while i was wandering around campus killing some time. it's always great to see them even if our paths are so-far separated for the most part these days!
thenn there was some dinner with green_pheasant and missing of linearb who was scheduled to be there with us, but we caught up with him later on, so at least there's that! then what was one of my favorite events of the whole trip, a couple of hours of heart-to-heart talking with my old writing group (incl audissius, deannaroy, and signor_ferrari, capped off nicely at sheilagh's solstice festivities where i got an hour of the squeak and xacat show (plus of course sheilagh and others i never managed to connect with in my post-silverchat days, like litch). tuesday was a lot calmer until the evening, which featured a highly nonsuck happy hour with the old (what, 10 years now, bermanism?) DRK101 crew, in which we roped in sheilanova plus some others who are always great to see and get drunk with...
weds was largely friends older than LJ (i met gavino, scott, and jeff in 1994. holy crap.), relaxing and eating everything i'd so far missed (barbecue and blue bell for the win!) before a nice relaxed evening with chicafantasma. we dined on breakfast tacos this morning and realized my credit card had been left at the bbq place, and then i got on the train anyway, cos it was leaving. ohwell. stage 2 of xmas trip, with $5 in my pocket and nothing more. we'll see how this goes!
next time i should make a conscious effort to meet up with more of my rarely-seen friends whom i miss a lot--bigreddot, bikers_are_hot, neutron, mr_skullhead and the GYMO crowd, plus the nucleartacos crowd, and more. fortunately next time is soon--see you folks in march, i hope!
Hayao Kawai, the self, and the great mother The other day, chatting with Alin Huma, I asked "Who was it who said the Japanese have no pyschoanalysis, and no need for psychoanalysts, because they have no unconscious? Because all the neuroses are on the surface here?"
"It was Lacan, wasn't it?" said Alin.
Actually, there have been Japanese psychoanalysts. Hayao Kawai (1928-2007), for instance. If Freud delved into the Bible and Greek mythology for motifs like Moses and Oedipus, Kawai delved into Buddhism, Japanese folk tales, and even the novels of Haruki Murakami for his motifs and examples. Kawai thought of himself as a Jungian. Much of his work examines the difference between the Eastern and Western mindsets.
1. A tendency to introversion 2. The location of consciousness outside the self 3. The strength of "the great mother inside"
According to Kawai, there's a lack of distinction in the Eastern world between consciousness and unconsciousness (an idea which mirrors Lacan's thought about everything we think of as "deeply buried" being out in the open and up on the surface in Japan). Eastern philosophy seeks the self, historically, in its own unconsciousness. Jung said that when Westerners say the word "mind" it refers to consciousness, but when Easterners say the same word it refers to the unconscious.
Here's a simple diagram Kawai made to show the differences between the Eastern and Western minds, as he saw it. The Eastern self lives in the unconsciousness, which means there's a lack of knowledge of the self. The self in Westerners is put in the centre of consciousness, which means that the self is seen as strong, central and independent -- and yet frail, because this Robinson Crusoe is surrounded by the unknown, able to be overwhelmed and undermined at any moment by powerful "instincts" and "impulses" from somewhere else.
As a result of this basic organisation of the self, Westerners tend to find the meaning of their life in a fight with fate and with their own nature, whereas Easterners tend to find the meaning of life in "tasting their fate"; accepting it, and living in harmony with their own nature. The typical Western dramatic hero struggles against the inevitable, whereas the typical Eastern hero "tastes" and accepts it.
This leads to differences in attitudes to "the great mother" (which relates to my thoughts about the robotic female authority figure in overwhelmed by milk). In the West, thinks Kawai, people have to kill their mother in order to win their independence. In the East, people try to achieve independence without killing the mother.
In Japan, says Kawai, people tend to model any kind of social group on family relationships, in both good and bad ways. When your school and company is a family group, things can sometimes get intolerable, stifling. On the other hand, society as a great universal mother can bind people together and make them less lonely.
Kawai didn't entirely see Japan as an Eastern culture, though; for him it was an important bridge, a place where Western and Eastern conceptions of the self and society could mingle.
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Anniversary of a cosmic blast
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