Hiya, Troopers! I moved. I live in the heart of Tokyo now. 2 weeks ago, I quit working my silly job as a teacher of junior high school students and graduated to media. Neat! But really, I just want to tend a garden. And I may still!
Last night, I went to the onsen in the dead asphalt neon center of Tokyo. Supposedly, the waters of this spa are bubbling up from deep beneath the Earth. The pools were jet black, glassy I-pod black. You could shave your face without a mirror. Maybe it was filthy water. Dunno.
Hope everyone out there is kicking ass.
I was just reading my journal.
And I wanted to say, "I'm sorry."
I thought I might go back and find something here which I could enjoy. Something clever.
But I can't find anything clever here, just more of the petulant, blathering and redundant internet I've come to know. I'm trying to find something to blame it on. Perhaps my education? Maybe my upbringing? DNA? Culture? America?
However, I enjoyed many of my photographs.
I hope everyone is doing well, feels happy, and is making a move of some kind.
P.S.
There were bits here and there that I think are pretty good.
But generally, I can't tolerate this kind of person.
Sucks that it was me.
Weird.
I'll try to start writing on livejournal again.
Or maybe not.
Not with a bang, but a whimper. Ciao
"No, I lost them over there."
She screws up her eyes. "well why the hell are we here."
"because there`s more light here." says he.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor
"Zenbei ga naita --- literally, "the entire United States wept." In usage, it means "nothing important".
One might be moved to wonder how the above expression could possibly take on such an unrelated meaning. After checking the blogs, your reporter came up with this explanation: When many U.S. films open in Japan, they are accompanied by posters claiming that American viewers were moved to tears. But the such films have little emotional impact on viewers here. So Japanese filmgoers have learned, apparently, to disregard such promotional claims as largely meaningless."
Music is not sacred. The main reason there is a hardcore authenticity hierarchy is because monkeys like status, and they invent whatever system they need to give themselves status. Sure, is is possible to say that someone is a more serious musician and conclude that their output is of a higher quality; but that has nothing to do with status and everything to do with music as a product and the ways we make judgements about it as a product.
Hopefully, the following will not offend too many folks. I`m narrowing things down in order to highlight a little sinister quality in American subculture, but forgive me for giving no regard to all the innocent pleasures of listening, consuming, and dressing up which I fail to celebrate; and which unfortunantly reside out there in the precarious regions of the shooting range.
I think, in America, most people attracted to music and art outside of major self-regulating scenes like those in New York, L.A., Seattle, and Chicago. (And that`s about it) get the majority of their exposure to it from MTV, and not from actual scenes where the movements start. So, anyway, `the rock star` is the defining factor in every type of out-of-scene music and the people who are drawn to it really are infatuated with the status perk. That is what the music expresses, that is what the music invites, that is the image the music tempts the consumer with: status. It expresses status not-so-subtly, and is differentiated by strategies for getting status. Emo = mysterous passive sensuality and greater `authenticity` makes you better than anyone else. Country = traditional values and quintissential americaness makes you better than anyone else. Hip Hop = money makes you better than anyone else.
Goth? Goth is really interesting, and I think forms of it have been around for a long time but not couched in the same aesthetic. Goth throws back to pre-american Aristocratic values, values which ruled society before the major democratic revolutions. Basically, the idea that there is something essentially special about a -class- of people. `Royals`, `Nobels`, `Kings`, `Priests` . You`ll notice that goths imitate the fashion styles, accents, and mannerisms of long-gone European aristocracies, but with more black.
They even delve into the architecture, arts, and designs of aristocratic eras. Gothic Cathedrals, Gargoyles, etc. I think that the goths is a type of American that has been around since the revolution, but which always pops up in new forms. Once they were loyalists. Then there were the southern plantation owners (who were very cultured and enamoured of olde England). Some of the more intellectual goths, as they get older and more interested in politics, might start to make their anti-democratic tendencies more overt, and the less contemplative goths will fill the pews. What unites Goths, loyalists, and pre-war southerners is their desire for an aristocratic worldview and their disdain for democratic values (oh, normal people! the masses! the mensch!). I think that anyone who has been close to goth culture or to goths will right-off be able to surmise how this is a defining characteristic of that subculture, even above that lovely `dark` side blather.
In the words of Shumit Basu, owner of a fashionable gothic garmet shop in New York City called `the underground aristocracy`; " I have been a bit concerned about the length of the name, it is something of a mouthful. The idea behind the name reflects an attitude I’ve sometimes perceived in the gothic scene that gothic people are somehow more special and deserving than other sorts of people. Kind of like “if only I was living in the 17th century...” So in a sense, the gothic scene represents a sort of modern day aristocracy, but as no one else might agree with this, it’s underground, hidden from sight.
The preferance for aristocracy touches and informs everything they do. They are atavists. The `dark side` thing strikes me as a kind of smoke screen. Take `Vampires` for instance. It`s not about Bram Stoker`s bloodsucker or Translyvanian burial rituals - it is an aristocratic fantasy. Take the lyrics to this early Bauhaus (canonized by goths) song:
"All we ever wanted was everything
All we ever got was cold
Get up, eat jelly
Sandwich bars, and barbed wire
Squash every week into a day
The sound of drums is calling
The sound of the drum has called
Flash of youth shoot out of darkness
Factorytown
Oh to be the cream repeat "
What you have here, in a nutshell, is a disdain for `normal` life, which is really a disdain for the working class. There is also regurgitation of the romantic criticism of industrialism (factory town), some magical youth stuff, and a declaration of ones desire to be `the cream` i.e. aristocrats who do not have to suffer the indignities of the lesser `normal` working class.
Fortunantly, goth will probably never get out of the world of fantasy and will remain, like the Society of Creative Anachronism, just a little bit of harmless atavism. Goth is atavism for powerless first-worlders who cannot derive satisfaction from at-times bungled, at-times sophisticated, meritocratic and democratic social order.
I think they have more in common with their namsake than we think, those actual goths who sacked Rome. Barbarian aristocrats with crap art who envied the politically, socially, and culturally superior partially democratic Romans. Except the only thing that modern goths can sack is other people`s groceries.
Rebirtha commented on my last entry and said, "Where would you suggest women go to live and never get old?" I mentioned that men could come to Japan and live like bachelors for ages, and without going into it, sided by saying that it was not possible for women. So, yes, I mentioned a kind of paradise, but like so many advantages, much of it is based on privledge. Not privledge in the strict economic sense, but much deeper than that. Privledge based on how our society was constituted and transformed by our desires, our disequllibrium of power, and our biology. Japanese women, who I fondly rap about, do not always have it so great. Women in general do not always have it so great. Concerning Japanese women, this is not because they are `submissive` in their basic interactions. There is more than meets the eye in that tramped-around stereotype.
The `submissiveness` of Japanese women is a character trait that has very little to do with the amount of power they have - it is just a style of interaction, and more often than not, this seeming weakness is a way of stepping up and overtaking her partner. When a girl takes my bag from me or manages the way my shoes are settled before the tatami, she is participating in my autonomy, taking control of little things, organizing me the way she wants me organized. On several occasions my guilt got to me and I resisted this and tried to prevent someone from `serving` me in this way, but I met with frustration. By not offering her some of my autonomy, I am threatening her control. In a way, I am unbalancing power in my direction - and I think this makes her feel a little rejected or useless. In the average Japanese household, the wife is the recepient of all the income and makes all the financial decisions.
She chooses the clothes her husband wears, the way the living space is put together, and almost every other aspect of everyday life. The husband is like a very influential child. The money goes straight into her pocketbook, and she rations it back out to her husband and her family. So in basic interaction, at least where I see it, there is an invisible equality.
Where society fails to provide for her is at the level of ultimate destiny. Her poverty is in the impotence of her dreams, her career, her power to freely choose her mate, her community, her role in society. She may control the money that is made, but she cannot make the money she controls. As a wife or a mother, she is empowered; but as an individual she is repressed.
Men go to a four year college, but most women are expected to attend only two year colleges, after which they get a menial and temporary job as an office lady - just a secretary, number cruncher, or hostess to clients. They do not get the same salary as men, and they almost invariably hit a glass ceiling when the rise through the ranks. It does not matter much if they are better workers, smarter, or more productive - they are not given access to places in which they can really shine. Japanese companies are not meritocratic. The men rise through the ranks based on the time they spend waiting, passing from one level to the next filling the empty spaces as the oldest men die or retire.
The women do not make it high enough to become truly autonomous, and very importantly, there is -no- maternity leave. If, in their late twenties or thirties, they want to heed the call of nature; then the sword comes down on them and their transformation into housewife becomes complete. This is the system. It is efficient and it is mostly unchallenged. There are ways out of it, but they are not easy. Japanese men prefer that their women become housewives, and the more independent and ambitious a woman is, the less likely she is to find a mate. Many younger women who see the lonely lives of their older weathered ambitious counterparts feel pity for them. And it is common to hear an older women who chose autonomy over the simple life lament a spiritual vacency.
There are exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between. Find a husband who will make all the sacrfices to safegaurd his wife`s autonomy, and who will still weather the tedious life of a salaryman without the comfort of a lady waiting at home who is routinely dedicated to his autonomy and not her own, or if her own, only as a projection into him. It feels great to be loved unconditionally. Who doubts that?
Not to say that a housewife is a -bad- thing. It is a life, after all, and can be as fufilling as any role we decide to play. But we should be able to -decide-. That`s what matters. Some Japanese women want nothing more than to be wives and mothers. That is their dream, and there is nothing, nothing at all, wrong with it. It is not to be frowned on or derided. Don`t get me wrong. I feel bad for even disclosing this in the form of a disclaimer. To raise a child and maintain a family is one of the most ambitious undertakings a human being can aspire to, if they dare.
However, I think society would be better off if more women were in positions of power, and were given room to participate in determining the way in which society arcs and forms.
But I think this is going to change in Japan, precisely because it is not meritocratic and Japanese men are more inept than women in handling economy. The economy is ruled by the consumer, and the Japanese woman is consumer extraordinaire. All domestic flux is determined by their whims and their choices, and they know it inside and out. In the boardrooms and offices, armies of securely employed salaryman spend day and night trying to tap the massive unquestioned economic resource that is their bread and butter, the Japanese woman. And then they go home to them at night, and empty their pockets, having made money off making money off them. Eventually, I suspect the circle will complete itself.
Already, Japanese women who do manage to rise up through the ranks and grasp some authority end up more successful and savvy than their male counterparts. Eventually, it should click. In my experience as a teacher, watching hundreds of young Japanese move through the schools, it is obvious that the girls are smarter, more aware, more knowledgable. And here, maybe, society is letting down the guys by making them ill-equipped for any big economic or social shifts that the future may neccessitate.
There are countless little fractures in the inequality of men and women, here though. Fractures that the women take advantage of. They may not be able to easily leave their husbands or choose their husbands. It is common to see the young paired with the old. Yet, how do these relationships play out? Japanese women are unfaithful. I don`t think this is a bad thing - they are just exerting their freedom to choose lovers and live their lives how they want. A few weeks ago I was flirting with a recently married Japanese lady who told me, quite frankly, that she was looking for lovers. She did not say it to be shocking, but just matter-of-factly. The girls are sexually liberal, sexually progressive. I like it. It`s exciting. It`s individuality and autonomy popping out wild, overtaking taboos, overtaking dusty morality, asserting desire. I dig it. Oh, sure, they are betraying their primary mates trust or something like that, but they are not betraying their own desires and passions - that`s what`s important.
Okay, back to the basic unfairness, women and men generally. The reason I can get away with living like a 23 year old until I am 43 is because I will always be sexually viable. If I stay in relatively good shape physically and financially, a younger woman will like me when I am 33, and when I am 43, and I will be able to bag her. I also do not get pregnant, and do not have a biological clock; therefore there is no reason for me to expend a massive massive amount of time and energy there. There are no epochal physical events between here and far reaches of decay. Older women, on the other hand, are not hot. The line is too clearly drawn. Everything sags, wrinkles, inflates, and craps out after a while. They become sexually unattractive. Guys want beautiful women, and beautiful women are young, and so they reject older women.
It is not because guys are pigs. It is a mistake to think that. It is because the physical costs of bearing children are so high that sexual viability is not a useful trait after a certain age. However, the physical costs of producing and distributing sperm are next to nothing, so men remain sexually viable after a certain age. Instead of thinking in terms of the wills of men and women, think of the wills of sperm and wombs. Good sperm seek good wombs and care very little for the bodies of the people they inhabit, democracy, egalatarianism, feminism, or any of that. Sperm happen to be flapping around in men between the ages of 14 and 80, while good wombs are only enshrined in women between the ages of 14 and thirty-something. And so the bodies respond by organizing themselves accordingly, and the desires respond by organizing themselves accordingly, and the activities and societies respond by organizing themselves accordingly. If men are pigs, then it is because they are born pigs. Hell, the men don`t even really care about extending their gene pool. Men are just recreational, infatuated, in love with beauty. Unfortunantly, the `system`, and not the one outside of us but inside of us, determines how men recreate, infatuate, and love beauty.
It`s a bit of a misnomer to refer to nature as `mother nature` when it seems to be so cruel to its kind. Thinking, philosiphizing, idealizing and moralizing human minds try to do what they can to solve this problem. In the west we have maternity leave, guilt, the conception of the dirty old man - all of it an attempt to ease this fundamental inequality.
Of course, it would be fitting to make the objection right now, "but Jacob, you are assuming that sex determines the quality of a life! It`s not all sex! So what! Maybe older men have better things to do than act on their trivial sexual desires." Okay, that`s good. I accept that. I am a pig, but it still does not change the fact that it is unfair, and it also does not change the fact that I will love beautiful women, and want to love them carnally, for a long long time.
So, how can this problem be resovled? Luckily, it can eventually be resolved. Trans-fucking-humanism. I`m surprised that more women have not sniffed out the liberation that technology can promise. Contraception alone was a world-changing event for women, freeing them from the spectre of pregnancy. It is genes that switch on and off making us attractive and unattractive, thousands of years of selfish plotting genes that we inherit these inequalities from. We get nearer and nearer to a time, if politicians, theologians, and economies permit it, where we can change some of these previously `fixed` attributes. Maybe it will mean making the appearence of youth last well into old age, or it will mean reengenering the reproductive process so that it no longer takes an unfair toll on the lives of half our species. If Father Nature gives way to Mother Tech, then all of these tragically fundamental inequalities could be eradicated. We are pretty damn close. The major obstacles are cultural. We are afraid of changing what it means to be human, and there is an army of nervous theologins and politicians fighting to put it off. Fuck em, and let`s all lay down and find out what are bodies are for, why don`t we?
I hear dogs....or is it cats? Cats howling? My guide tomorrow has one false eye. He fought the Khemer Rouge for five years "without ever knowing a woman's body". Now he takes twenty dollars a day to drive me around and chat and corruption in the government, the future of Cambodia, and French people. He makes some of the most authentic machine-gun sounds. More of a put-put-put, not the blamalamamamlama of hollywood film.
Anyway, I'm not dead at all.
When I flew into Hong Kong, I saw a dizzying array of lights nailed into the Earth, fixing the ground in space for we aerials. The patterns of ligs made the sea and islands recognizable, ordered, predictable, chosen by people and gas-machines. But as I descended into Cambodia, all I saw was the night sky above and below. A spot of electric bulb was indistinguishable from a far-away star. Black, Black, Black. No Earth, no crazy man-made blinkering. In Cambodia, the illusion was that there was nothing but night sky above and below. My little airplane was roaring through deep space with its little propellers.
Yet, I knew that between each star on the ground was no vacuum, but jungle. With landmines, supposedly. The first thing I saw when the plane landed was a giant billboard with King Sinohuik's face on it.
Anyway, now: the smell of meat, flies, beggar with one leg, squeek of some child's toy, and I've got to poo. I'm going to go poo now.
Anyway, this is live from an internet cafe in a run-down jungle city that's going to become nice in the next ten years.
When I first got to Tokyo, I thought it looked rained on. This place looks like it was smoked on. Everything is sooty and messy. The food stalls smell like bird flu and poo poo. I've already been offered buddhist relics, smuggled silks, women, girls, little girls, and snake blood. I recall that from the movie 'The Beach'.
I"m buying Louis Vuitton goods for pennies in street markets so that I can deface it and shock the Japanese shoppers when I get home.
I've got a bus to catch. Cambodia. Maybe there will be an internet stall there as well.
-Democracy in America
My reading of this is that egalitarianism in America was enforced by circumstances, whereas in Europe it was artificially instituted from above. Political choices were made. Aristocrats were beheaded. Laws were made to give to men what the Earth could not.
But in America, the democracy which the entire world chattered about in salons rose naturally, with less political, martial, or revolutionary upheaval.
It is said that America was born by revolution. Oher countries tried to have that same American revolution, but after the blood was shed and the constitutions writ large, instead of a bright new day, everything fell apart. Why did the revolution work in America?
Simple. Because there was no revolution in America. No system was changed from within. Instead, a mostly natural mostly non-hierarchical society severed itself from an aristocratic powers that were trying to subsidize it. America is an expat experiment, an escape, a wilderness for quitters.
I realize it’s been 200 years, but I also realize that it’s only been 200 years. Isn’t it kind of ironic that Americans get censured if they flirt with the idea of not being loyalists? And for those of you who don’t censure, there are those of you who patiently try to remind us that we have to fight from the inside(wherever that is), stand up, accept and resist, stand triumphantly on our porches with curses in our pockets. You know, that good ole “I’m radical and against radicals too. Whoa! R-e-s-p-e-c-t!”. From here on out, I will refer to this and other things as Libertarian Masterbationism.
Libertarian Masterbationism is political role-playing. You take guns, absurdly discordant worldviews, ‘freedom’, and a tenuous connection to the ‘true intentions of our founding fathers’, and, last but definitely not least, your Great Difference From Everyone Else, and there you have Libertarian Masterbationism in a nutshell. If you’re not a democrat and not a republican and you’re not a hippie, well, don’t despair friend! Have you heard of Libertarianism? Guns, science, superstition and in-your-own-home-oh-sex Ok! We may not change the world, but out of all the political parties, we have the finest circle jerks an American patriot can attend!
I'm worried that the circle jerk will become less sancrosanct thanks to this political immorality
Let me be less hostile. I don’t really believe that everyone should pack their shit and leave America . 'America', whatever it is, is not a book that will end soon. The land is beautiful, and all you need is good people around you to live a good life. However, it's great to get out for a little while, mainly because of the media and that which is consistent in the worldviews of people around you, both enemies and friends. By consistent, I mean invisible. Find yourself in a situation where you can’t help but be someone else. Get wooed by the social urge and be awake while it happens. Find yourself lying about where you come from in order to explain to someone who has never been there who you would like to be. By ‘leaving’ America, you become an American.
Yet, if you are an American, you can never leave. Wherever an American is, that’s where America is. Those who have it in their cards to leave, (and I realize that everyone cannot and should not do this) do not be afraid. And that rest of you who can’t leave, don’t scare the people who should hightail it into sticking around and rotting just because you want to make your own excuse belong to everyone else too. There are lots of people with no prospects, no money, dead end jobs, unappreciated skills, and shit college degrees who are only trapped in Omaha because they have a great fear of what they don’t know about what it outside of America. How easy is it? How hard will life be? What will I be getting myself into?
It’s easy. Even when it is very difficult, it's good. And sometimes life can be like something out of a fantasy.
I mean, jesus, this really doesn’t even have to do with Bush and his administration. It’s just a good thing to do. Bush or no Bush. Take an extended vacation.
And Canada doesn't count.
There’s an earthquake. Just now. I often confuse the motion of my blood for a small earthquake – and I am in love with that problem. Is it my circulation or the tectonic plates? Wonderfully, they feel almost exactly alike. I know the difference by watching the branches of my aloe plant. If they are moving, then it has nothing to do with the beating of my heart.
Something just happened. I felt like I was being dragged up a tree by a pro-wrestler – it was a bit like the opening sequence of Doctor who. I held on the desk. But now, there’s a machine here in the room with me. It looks like a glasswork kitsch version of a Georgia O’Keeffe violet, but it has too much black color in the lap of its bloom, and even though it is brighter than the screen of my laptop, I can’t find a light source. I don’t know.
- Music:hypo - aux 3c
While we fight over oil, other countries concern themselves with ways of not needing oil. And while we get ready to heavily restrict emerging technology, other countries can’t wait to automate the working class and redesign the human. Do you think Japan will restrict gene therapy to the terminally ill? Do you think that the Chinese will consider pre-selecting a baby’s traits to be immoral? Do you believe that countries who have no oil and whose power in world affairs is determined by that lack will willingly reject alternative fuel sources. “Oh, no thanks. We would rather continue to take it in the ass from the barons than get our rations elsewhere.”
These issues which Bush apologists like to talk about are worthless when you consider that oil and religion cannot contend with the rise of posthumanism. Things have been done with laboratory rats that would make a eugenicist accidentally swallow his own skull. Under our noses, there is a postmouse-ist era happening right now. They try. It works. The mice are not exploding or going on mutant rampages. The ubermice exist. Technically, the differences in retooling a rodent and retooling a human being are trivial.
Let me try to make it clear: We pretty much have the power to make genetically enhanced 275 year old physically and neurally stronger human beings. When you vote for Bush, you are basically saything that you would like -other- nations who are indifferent to our ‘real issues’ to start going down that biotech road first. Furthermore, one of Bush’s policies is the restriction of stem cell research, that is, the harpooning of the hot-bed belly from which this innovation is coming. By examining the abortion controversy we get closer than anything else to actually talking about the big issue. People hate abortion because it makes us reconsider definitions of humans, it involves controlling the production of humans, and it describes human beings (selves, souls, me, persons, Americans) as a series of organic events which can be altered at our convenience. Ironically, it is due to stem-cell research that biotech is rocketing. The era of abortion will give way to construction.
Bush’s policies go in the opposite direction of history! Neocon-hawk realism is concerned with securing power in a disappearing paradigm.
Think of it as fighting over swords in a gun factory.
I’m reminded of what De’Touqueville had said about the rise of Democracy in America and Europe two hundred years ago.
“The various occurrences of national existence have everywhere turned to the advantage of democracy: all men have aided it by their exertions, both those who have intentionally labored in its cause and those who have served it unwittingly; those who have fought for it and even those who have declared themselves its opponents have all been driven along in the same direction, have all labored to one end; some unknowingly and some despite themselves, all have been blind instruments in the hand of God.”
-Luke 17:2
Like every other reasonable “liberal”, I believe there is a bubbly mobile thinking organism taking up mass in Washington D.C. He has ears, eyes, and a mouth which he uses to listen, see, and give feedback. His image and some of the noise he makes with his vocal cords gets replicated and sent to many places where many other members of his species can ‘see’ him. Therefore, he is familiar to many people. Knowledge of him takes up brain cells in billions of brains.
At this very moment he’s actually turning a scant amount of oxygen in the world into carbon dioxide. It’s happening right as we speak! Besides being able to move objects with his hands and say ouch when he hammers hits his thumb, he can sometimes give a very special kind of feedback to the world that I can’t give. Basically, he can make a sentence that causes millions of people to react in a very short period of time.
If I say something to someone, it will take a lot longer for what I said to cause millions of people to react. Their reactions to me also won’t be as dramatic as the kind he inspires. I can maybe cause just a few things to blow up before I have to stop. He can cause lots and lots of things to blow up before he has to stop. I can probably take some money away from a few people, but he can take a lot of money away from a lot of people.
The results of his actions are quantitatively great, but they are not qualitatively so. He has very little control over how everything will take shape around his actions, nor does he have control over what inspires, funds, and causes his actions in the first place. Not only does he lack control, he doesn’t even have much knowledge of what will happen when he throws his weight into the system. If he was an artist, he would not be the meticulous realist who plans every detail and fixes them precisely. No, he is the guy on hallucigens who throws his oil-fattened paintbrush from the roof at a canvas on the sidewalk. However, because his actions are quantitatively greater than the actions of other members of his species, we tend to form complex ‘opinions’ about him and his role.
An ‘opinion’ is an orderly expression of an irrational emotional phenomenon. We hear what he says, watch a few T.V. programs, hang out with our friends, and eventually we feel something about this fellow we all recognize but have never met. We feel angry, sad, happy, silly, amused. We think that he’s stupid, bad, nice, or strong. Usually these feelings happen because we learn them from our friends. Our friend associates Bush with poverty. Poverty reminds you that you can’t afford to own all the game consoles. Our friend grimaces and says ‘bastard!’ and then you try it and it feels cathartic. Most importantly, saying ‘bastard!’ with your friend makes the two of you closer. We form opinions because we can share them, and if you didn’t believe Jesus, the Dali Llama and the Eastern Bunny; let me tell it to you: Love makes the world go round.
I have no beef with love, but I am a little unsure about opinions. I’m not against them. Like every other reasonable liberal, I think that the man named George Bush is working in the wrong profession and should have been fired from his job. Yet, I don’t think that guy and my lack of game consoles is the same thing. I don’t think the war in Iraq and that guy is the same thing either. I believe they are wildly separate. Mr. Bush gives feedback, and there are many reactions. However, I don’t believe he controls what happens when he does something. I also believe that the little guy himself is just a reaction, just one of a billion channels through which comprehensive forces move.
To pin it on Bush or Bin Laden is to ignore the problem. This is the gross reduction a ‘common man/hero’ society believes in. If society is made up of common men, democracy might be the best way to express it. If it is made up of cogs, you might tend towards socialism. If it is made up of heroes, you might be in danger of totalitarianism. I am more of a cogist and generalist, but I don’t want to avoid metaphysics like the communists did. I believe general models apply to both dictatorships and democracies. But that's a subject for another day.
I think Iraq was bombed because the technology has been developed to blow shit up and a tradition has grown up around it. I also think it was bombed because of oil, but it isn’t really the material itself. It’s because about fifty years ago there were two other countries following the tradition of blowing shit up named Germany and Japan. They were blowing all kinds of shit up that we wanted to keep around. They wanted to destroy abstract art and make us eat with wooden sticks. Since they were better than anyone else at blowing the right shit up, they might have been able to do it. The only reason they didn’t get to is because there was a country called America which was out of range and had lots and lots of flammable black dead-dinosaur goo. After fighting off the dark armies of chopsticks and realism, America celebrated by molding our emotional content into the opinion that American extra-special intrinsic goodness had saved the day. Now, in secret back rooms, predominantly in the backs of minds, we admitted that oil that won that war. The existence of extra-special intrinsic goodness was not important. Oil was important. Oil killed the devil. Oil saved apple pie. Oil saved forks, spoons, Jews, Chinese culture, and abstract art. Oil is what made our celebration of extra-special goodness possible!
We attacked Iraq because they have the stuff that won World War II. Think of how close the world came to being ruled by Axis powers and consider that only one lucky little black fluid prevented it. Iraq was bombed because of desire and fear. Desire for weapons of mass Production and fear of what the Nazis and Japanese can do to the world if we don’t have it. As the first World War II victory celebrations raged, the actual memory of how things had worked out was permanently engraved into the consciousness of America, that is to say, into her international policy.
Yet this is just one reason why oil bombed Iraq. There’s also Moms with big cars, Halliburton and the Northern Alliance. These groups also contributed to what happened in Iraq, and whatever contributed to bringing those groups to life also contributed to what happened in Iraq. No one is in control, but everyone is making decisions.
Politicians are notorious for taking credit for things like booms in business cycles, even though these things happen despite them. And when cycles take a downturn, the same politician will blame the same economy to a political enemy. In 1988 Governer Dukakis took credit for the ‘Massachussets miricle’ until it snuck in and raped the high tech sector, at which point he said it was Reagan. In politics, cause and effect is just a rhetorical device. They’re like surfers taking credit for the tide.
So, back to that sack of skin and bone, George Bush. Did he do this? Did he choose this plan of action? Or was it history? Do you think that by not electing him that all the forces of history that conspired to bomb Iraq will step out of the office with him? Would Kerry have say “Shoo fly” and render impotent all the fear, desire, influence, and inertia that is rippling through time and space?
Bush sets off endless chain reactions, but he and the power vested in him is also just a link. It’s true that we cannot isolate Bush and use him as a reference to very complex economic and social forces that we would otherwise not be able to make heads or ‘tales’ of. By attacking Bush, I can attack his contributors. By removing him from the presidency, a vehicle through which many fears and desires are expressed is put out of commission. However, this does nothing to the fears and desires themselves. What you are doing is putting pressure on those social and economic forces to find alternative ways to expand. Terrorism itself is a result of this kind of pressure.
I think that America’s behavior is not defined by Bush, but by the fact that America is failing to accommodate itself to a post-cold war global heterogeny. American power is being counterbalanced. Europe is unifying. In the East, the third world is rapidly vanishing, yet so is foreign interference. Also, American culture itself has become so pluralistic that it is losing national sovereignty. There are so many diverse agents within America that her policies are being slowly knitted apart by extra-national agendas. This process has been going on for a long time. Essentially, America is being dissolved in the global soup it helped create, and this is exactly why there is a renewed nationalist movement. But don’t let the shouting and flag-waving fool you. It is only there to signal dissolution. It’s not something Bush or anyone can stop. They can only make it longer, bloodier, and uglier.
Despite the sermons of these raving patriots, this dissolution never needed to be considered the death or failure of America.
And now George Bush is being re-elected. This is being re-elected.
A man has been caught lying, cheating, stealing, failing. He is exposed. And you elect him to lead you?
Is there a crazy drug in the water supply?
I have friends out here who are turning their passports in tomorrow and renouncing their citizenship.
It's time for an American diaspora. I implore you: Leave your country. I believe this is going to start happening anyway because of creeping changes in economic and cultural geography. Intellectuals, artists, and moderates will probably start moving, especially when the middle class disappears, Spanish begins replacing English, politics becomes even less transparent, racist reactionary whites start reviving grotesque unscientific and fundamentalist theories, and new 'terrorism' makes living scarier.
To all of the above add a scientific advances-driven posthumanist revolution, but place said posthumanist revolution in non-christo/islamic countries which don't stigmatize research and block funding.
So the levy breaks and you flow out of America. It's beginning. Get a head start. It's easy, and the rewards come fast. We may not have the luxury of renouncing our citizenship. We will have to keep connections with America, but the majority of our time and energy need not be wasted there.
And it's not just because a2 + b2 = c2. It's because he is the architect of Western religion, the father of Western intellectual institutions, the first outcast who became a super-popular rock star figure, the first monk, the first great systematizer both of information and social code, and most importantly, the first person who decided that reality was divided between a world known by common sense and a finer reality that can only be known by uncommon sense. That last idea leads easily to both the world as understood through mathematics and the world as understood through a great battle between invisible spiritual forces. Pythagoras entangled both, and bequeathed both as separate legacies.
And I'm convinced that the greater part of what Pythagoras offers is yet to come.
"It all starts, I suppose, with the Pythagoreans versus their predecessors, and the argument took the shape of "Do you ask what it's made of - earth, fire, water, etc.?" Or do you ask, "What is its pattern?" Pythagoras stood for inquiry into pattern rather than inquiry into substance. That controversy has gone through the ages, and the Pythagorean half of it has, until recently, been on the whole the submerged half." -Gregory Bateson
Oh yeah, he also invented musical notes. Every Western musician is writing music using samples from his rykodiscs. And what did he believe he was doing when he systemized music? Why, discovering the laws by which suns, planets, and other celestial bodies interact, of course!
Realistically, everything I wrote might be more accurate if 'Pythagoras' was replaced with 'Pythagoreans'. Lastly, nothing truly accurate can be said. Ancient History is full of shadows.
I always first write in a notebook before I transcribe to a computer. Often, the final product ends up looking very different. Below is a scan of the original manuscript of my last entry.
( Read more... )
For several hundred years, the Edo river formed the Eastern perimeter of the shogun’s most interior realm. That’s me standing at the mouth of the river in my full go go power ranger capacity. In the Tokugawa days, the water was unspoiled. Now, it is more of a proper moat – even the fish risk their health by swimming across it. I’ve been told that some of the brooks filling it visibly froth with toxicity although I’ve never seen them myself.
Today, the Shitamachi district’s wonky alleyways are spread out from the Edogawa’s western banks, struggling to echo Tokyo of a former time. Its wooden buildings are kept intact. Shop-owners feel like they have a duty to the past. I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional mama-san even preserves lost handprints in the dust.
Despite this, old Tokyo is more myth than reality. The tired old shops and hundred year old sake bars are nestled only in back roads, between convenient stores, and behind locked aluminum drapes. The ‘traditional delights’ of Shitamachi and Koiwa described by tourist guides are nowhere near the surface. A man might live here for forty years yet fail to recognize his own town in a travel journalist’s description. Almost every district in Tokyo, including Shitamachi, is first of all made up of electric lights and power lines, second of all clothes hanging off the balconies above traffic signals singing MIDI tunes. The tunes sing to schoolgirls and salarymen about when to go and wait, stop and start. The cell phones in their pockets and purses are also ringing MIDI tunes to alert them to an Email or C-mail, phone-call or global satellite position (to keep them from going in circles on their way to the department store. I can program my phone to ring when it ends up in any specific ten square meters of planet Earth.
I enjoy setting alarms at unexceptional places so that later I will by mystified by the abandoned memory. I examine a place more closely. I want to be more aware of the small and specific. I’ve become obsessed with the Buddhist idea of mindfulness, that is, mindfulness itself. I use every trick I can to keep from becoming psycho-distant.
Once you cross enough tracks and plow in spirals through all of the urban gloss and crunch, you might spot a tattered red lamp hanging out in front of a cozy little yakitori place. That’s what the travel book claimed was here. The whole paragraph on the city featured in lonely planet, every adjective, can only be found hidden in a crack. Inside it are old men drinking flasks of hot sake and talking over recordings of actual strings being plucked.
Edo’s living nostalgia ekes on in the cracks. In some places west of the Edogawa you can find more visible examples, but you can’t help noticing how deliberate they are. Every old Japanese hotel is aware of its own cultural novelty. It’s a take on itself. Reminds me of the global neighborhoods in Epcot Center. ( I loved the Mexican volcano. Evil sky within!To fit in with the mood of traditional Tokyo, a young lady in a kimono behind a lobby desk may seem to have natural fingernails. But they’re actually fake, there only to hide her panty-pink animal print fake nails which are in turn adorning the non-GMO fingernails she was born with - if she still has them under there.
Shitamachi sometimes slinks across to the eastern banks of the Edo river where there is a city called Ichikawa. That’s where I live, at the doorstep of the Shogun.
Hiroshige made this famous woodblock print of Ichikawa-mama about twenty years before the American Civil War. You’ll find my apartment out there in the marshes, a six story building across the street from a private school for wealthy girls. The first floor of the building is a museum/bakery dedicated to a haiku poet.
From my balcony, I can’t seem to find Hiroshige surveying for his landscapes. He must be somewhere in the smog, hidden by a glut of mismatched apartment tops.
(Postscript: Last night, I found the temple he drew. I recognized the shape of the main building and they layout of it from his print. Some forms don’t disappear. The temple was built 500 years ago because of the suicide of a beautiful girl. The rest of the landscape was transitory. Rivers are gone. Marshes are gone. Great hills are leveled.
Because of light pollution, even the stars are lost. Yet, devotion to that beautiful girl’s death is still there.
The walls, light sockets, pipes and external wiring in my apartment have been recently given a fresh coat of chemical yellow. A building across the street looks like the headquarters of an esoteric secret society. The architecture is a mix of Japanese, modern, and space Egyptian. An eye of stained glass is fixed on the face of the building with a deformation of the emperor’s seal set within it like an iris. Sometimes a light is left on inside the main hall and the eye glows.
I’ve decided to walk to the Edogawa tonight. It is a mile or two away, but I won’t be going in a straight line. I’m taking my camera with me to document the trip. The batteries are dying, so I will raise the exposure and shun the flash. Besides, the flash always screws things up for unskilled photographers like myself and I’m much to beguiled by my colorful digital scrap to get any better. I find fuck-ups interesting in art. Almost all of the work I’ve done in art and music have been made out of mistakes. (with the solitary exception of writing)
All the photos in this entry were taken within two miles of my home, with the exception of one that was taken from outer space.
Semidarkness is dispersed in everything. The roar of traffic is a background hum. I’m walking in a sweet lonely place. I can see the dim light of a bedroom and a satiny wooden Japanese ceiling like I used to have in Shirako. It’s comfortable, quiet, and isolated. The sky is slipping down and cooling the street air. Clouds smooth by in the matted sky. The railroad tracks seem as if they never get used – as if you could fall asleep in the gravel there and not be found – then, an x begins flashing on and off and a bell begins piercing the night. Gearwheels start churning and safety bars roll down to choke off the roads. You don’t see it or hear it yet, but the wire has been tripped and its electric heralds have preceded it and set the dormant track machinery into motion.
Then, clattering hissing metal speeds around a curve and roars past you, ruffling your feathers. Crows unperch from the framework cables and fly away.
You see all the people inside and wonder where they are going. I remember being on the train myself many times, being a bit of flesh information that it shuffles. From the outside when you watch the train’s wheels grinding steel on steel, and the neighborhood being divided by its stampede, you feel honored to have yourself been carried by it before. You earned the right by being human, yourself a carrier of objects, information, and capital. Contributing to the construction of society, it contributes to you – giving you the gift of convenience and god speed, but at the insistence that you accept the prescribed paths. The train traps everyone inside and ratchets them to the rails. We organize all our desires around the tracks and the nodes – even if we never use the train. Restaurants, places, schools, communities, relationships – everything revolves around the rails. Written on the earth are these - the laws of urban mobility. The attraction to any one thing makes you a part of the city’s body.
When the train passes, the empty tracks are right where you left them, as tranquil as they were before. Once again it's as if they have been undisturbed for a hundred years. But now, across the street where the arms raise and open the road, you will find bicycles and pedestrians that have accumulated while the way was blocked. This cluster of people unscrambles and they swerve for space, each using their personal strategies. They pass each other or give way intuitively. Some go left, some right, some straight, some prep their trajectory for downhill glides while others pump the peddles to go uphill. I wonder about their destinations. Their ages, fashions, and styles of bike are different. One man rides a dwarfish looking “stag”. Another bike has the bottom of its basket rusted out and the grocery bag is hanging stabbed on the loose metal. Schoolgirls, housewives, salary men, and brat kids are all bike riders. A car couldn’t fit on many of the streets, and it certainly can’t be parked easily. Where there is space, it is stellar expensive. (An average parking spot will cost you $400 US a month.)
Trains and commuters: I compare the people mover and the moving people. One is chaotic, specific, minute, creative. The other is general, organized, big, and fast. However, even within the train we can remain ourselves. We still shuffle around for a good seat and make or own ways closer to the door, or to the car that will sidle up closest to the most convenient exit at our stop. We hold the bar or the plastic handle and choose whether to scan the advertisements or not. All these little freedoms keep us tidy, and maybe they make us feel that it is our choices powering the train. The train carries us and our strategies, intentions, and specific destinations. It moves our movement, magnetizing us to itself. It was originally designed to according to old street car layouts and the statistical waves of now dead commuters. It can accommodate minorities and majorities, but never individuals – does the commuter reflect on this every morning? The train tracks in Tokyo have existed so long that it is now the organizer of origins and destinations. It defines the way and the out of the way. Before the city and its population reconstructed itself out of itself, the lines had been laid out to fulfill some hope of reaching certain nodes. But now, all hopes finished, it determines the territory on which new hopes are to be drawn . It provides the geography on which human intentions are fixed and shaped.
Don’t I feel as if the city is alive? The corners, edges, rooftops, and the ubiquity of military time clocks and the schedules that require them. Time unites us like city planning unites us. Wherever you are, it is the same moment. And wherever you want to go, it is the same place. First there is Being itself. Then there are its essential characteristics: Time and Space. Next, there are schedules and maps anchored to those times and spaces. And lastly, subordinated to all of the above are thinking blobs of meat. Interesting universe.
I pass one little garden after the other, sealed up in the personal spaces of tenets. Each is a quaint uninvaded oasis. Nature, usually expansive, folds up around itself and becomes private. Gardens in which boxes with gardens in them grow. We can see over the door, through the slants in the trees to the foliage and the stones embedded. There are small ponds with happy carp and bulbous googly-eyed Asian goldfish swimming around under the black mirror surfaces. I can hear the sound of an electric water wheel turning over and over, like someone peeing.
I can’t photograph the personalities of the people who live in inside these places, their power bills, the history, or the rats and the roaches. I’m photographing light in motion around objects. It’s only a Shimmering, lifted out of the water and digitized and colorized. If it does seem plastic and abstract to you, then be sure that it still represents Tokyo and her edges tonight.
*The text above is from a book I recently read called The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. He was killed instantly in a car wreck a few years ago.
- Music:Holland
Just a mere 50 miles above our heads, the temperature is between 1,000 and 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a new theory of Earth痴 atmosphere presented by Prof. B. Guthenberg of the California Institute of Technology. This extremely hot weather a few miles up comes as the result of Prof. Guthenberg痴 novel theory that the atmosphere is practically the same in composition throughout and not exclusively helium in some high layers, as other physicists have concluded. Although the temperatures are high in the heights of the stratosphere, the air is very diffuse and thin. Only a rocket could actually penetrate the atmospheric heights to bring back evidence of what actually exists there, Prof. Guthenberg said. The shells of the long-range gun used by the Germans in bombarding Paris probably traveled in a highly heated region
TRAVEL TO THE MOON BY THE YEAR 2050
By the year 2050, Earth-dwellers will probably be able to travel to the moon and to communicate with their terrestrial home by telephoning over a beam of light. They will get there by traveling in a rocket ship at a speed of some 50,000 miles an hour, but far sooner, probably 1950, it is likely that a speed of 1,000 miles an hour will be possible.
This was the prediction made by Dr. John Q. Stewart, associate professor of astronomical physics at Princeton University and coauthor of a leading astronomical textbook.
Speaking before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Stewart made what he called an "educated guess" about the future of rocket travel through interplanetary space.
EINSTEIN PROPOSES SYNCHRONIZED WORLD
Synchronization of the electrical pulse of the world, so that all astronomical, telegraphic, and radio instruments shall be in exact time with each other, was proposed in a communication presented by Albert Einstein, famous German physicist, at the recent meeting of the League of Nations Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.
The idea which Prof. Einstein endorses was first suggested by Prof. Arthur Korn, the German inventor of television apparatus. In the complexities of modern civilization, time instruments accurate to microscopic fractions of seconds frequently determine the success or failure of important scientific work, govern industrial processes involving millions of dollars, and even guard the safety of human lives. Prof. Korn's proposal is that instead of the many separate clocks now used, a single master pendulum of extreme precision be employed, and its beats be signaled throughout the world by radio.
RADIUM GIFT USEFUL
The gift of one twenty-eighth of an ounce of radium, worth $100,000, made by the women of America to Madame Curie in 1921 has been instrumental in establishing and proving a new law of nature.
Mme. J.S. Lattes, a worker in Mme. Curie's laboratory . . . was able to confirm definitely, using the American radium, a law discovered by Georges Fournier in the same laboratory, according to which there is a simple mathematical relation between the absorption coefficient of a material and its atomic number.
She also . . . learned how to avoid the destruction of the flesh, or necrosis, which occurs when a radium tube is improperly used. Essentially, her method is to use first a thin sheath of a dense metal, such as platinum, around the radium, and then to wrap the tube in many layers of light material, such as gauze, to absorb the secondary rays issued from the platinum.
Busy as of late job searching and relaxing in saunas and hot springs. Preparing for an interview for a University teaching job in Tokyo, another Japanese proficiency test, and have several other interviews lined up as well. Working at the University level would be nice. Things are running smoothly, although I still have problems with hanging up my clothes when I should.
I'm trying to write three things, but havn't finished one. I have sworn myself to not post them or send them to anyone unless I finish them. I do that too often.
Please return to your regularly scheduled program.
- Music:Nobukazu Takamura
When I got out it was lonely at the entrance, and I felt a bit spotlighted in my suit, my oversized cuffs. Being stared at with wariness by the Japanese guards outside the dimly lit cobblestone before classical British buildings. At the wrought iron gates, they do not check my bags. They search a page for my reservation. Although, transfers have been made through the banks and, I would think, security checks have been made by the information processing robot at the heart of every first world government – I don’t expect them to find my name – it would seem indecent for me to see my name on that page, impossible, as if the stars were aligned wrong. It would cause me to question the severity of governments, the tenacity and moneyed pre-eminence of bureaucracies, and will play strange with my illusions of self-importance.
But there it was, it some half-form . Jake Michael Davies. I am not a Davies, for one, nor a Jake. I wonder briefly if I was right, but have lucked into having a name similar to some other Scottish or British entrepreneur who has yet to arrive. I don’t hesitate, of course, let him rot. I’m going to the party. They don’t check my id. They don’t take my bag. They don’t inspect my homemade napalm thrower either.
Out of place with having no friends or connections, I walked across the dark torch lit English garden towards a building with a Scottish flag draped sloppily near the door. It appears recent or temporary. Behind the glass, I can see a man in a kilt with a Ulysses S. Grant moustache chatting with a fat guy in a tuxedo. The kilt is a daunting intense figure – it would be no surprise to find him dashing across the moors hundreds of years ago with an blood-caked battle ax….in his teeth……with his arms slashed off……dashing away on crimson stubs where his knees should be… to slaughter the English. My own cultural inclinations sees him as a civil war veteran – that oversized, meticulously trimmed classic moustache hiding his lips and leaving his eyes to intimidate you. There is something threatening about a lonely isolated pair of eyes – we must, I suspect, when we read faces, get a lot of information from the way the lips move, twitch, and lay on the face.
I’m nervous about going in, passing this gauntlet of a Scottish warrior. God knows he’s a rich fucker – one of the four largest accounting firms in the world is owned by the Scottish. He might fell me with the battle axe to maintain decorum. Maybe I should wait outside in the dark for Iain, my Scottish ‘mate’, to arrive and legitimize my presence with his man-skirt.
Then again, waiting outside of an embassy party on a moonless night looking nervous and carrying a mysterious bag doesn’t make you very inconspicuous – especially when everyone who came in earlier knows the Japanese guards are being lax about checking picture I.D. When a man looks into my eyes he can see that I’m the kind of person who would consider sneaking something mischievous in; but although they can see this, they cannot determine weather it would be a grotesque bird mask or a dirty nuke. People like me are either dangerous or stupid – it’s hard to tell the specific difference.
When I enter he shifts his attention to me rapidly, bearing down on me with his eyes and completely neglecting the conversation he was in. I smile, weakly, and his moustache moves in response.
“IT’S ALWAS GUUD TO SHO ALOT OF CUFFF.” He says, in piercing Scottish sibilants. He speaks loudly, like a man hard of hearing.
Well, I know my shirt is too large and that my cuffs are not proportionate, but I don’t know if this is a fashion or not. In fact, I know very little about suits or cuffs or tuxedos, just that they make you look sometimes professional, sometimes dapper, and sometimes uninteresting. Is it always good to show a lot of cuff? Or is this sarcasm. I smile in response. “yeah…heh…a lot of cuff…..I do, don’t I…..heh.”
“I SAID ITS ALWAS GUUD TO SHO A LOT OF CUFFF.”
“Yeah,” I say again, walking over towards him and extending my hand. “My name’s Jacob. “
And so, I’m obviously an American now. You can see it in their eyes. What the bloody hell is an American doing here? I must be some rich young snot-nosed kid, some corporate babe.
Then, my savior arrives. An old smiling British man approaches me, gleaming. He is the most British british man I’ve ever met. He belonged to a former time.
“Ah, Jacob, Jacob, I shall indeed try to remember your name! I would offer you the cloak room for your bag, dear sir, but I’m afraid the queen’s budget didn’t include a cloak room for the embassy…ho ho ho…..”
“What was that?”
“I said we are at the end of our budget chap! No cloak room. We have everything else, but none of that. Please, put your bag here though, and don’t forget where you laid it.”
I have been saved from the Scottish baby-eater.
“So,” the British gentleman asks”, May I ask, what organization do you represent, Jacob? Are you on the committee?”
“Oh, sorry, I’m just here by myself. I came on a friend’s request. “
The old man smiles from ear to ear and claps his hands softly. “Well, Ho ho, that’s wonderful news, Jacob. So you’re an independent gentleman !”
And that, dear reader, is probably one of the finest titles I've ever been given. He meant it in the strictest, most serious sense. There was nothing funny about it. Also, it was sincerely a delight for him to discover this fact. I don’t exactly know why he found it so rewarding to find I had no affiliation, but I have a feeling it may have something to do with the changes that have taken place over the last fifty years. Colonialism, the spreading out of self-motivated entrepreneurs, the wars, the end of colonialism, the dawn of late capitalism, and the endless mergers that miniaturized the world and swallowed up every last independent gentleman, making him instead, an employee. Perhaps I’m just being romantic, but I would like to think I represented an exhilarating, more adventurous twentieth century to this old man, a former twentieth century, the last echo of the nineteenth century. I suspect he was a bit senile, really, but it made him a lot more amiable.
Not that I find selfish commonwealth colonists and the world wandering whip masters of laize faire capitalism to be, after all I’ve read, knights in shining armor – but this old man’s demeanor certainly made me reconsider the attitude that disparages them. You have to meet a man before you condemn the contribution of his type to history.
“Go to the bar, get yourself a drink, chap.”
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dragonmonkey- Jack Sensei
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