Right now I am in the process of uploading pictures to facebook. Some are not as good as others. I was gona put those less-exciting but still fun pictures on lj..but I've found my mom's computer isn't really all that good at having more than one window open at once..and firefox won't work at all. I've deleted and reinstalled it like 4 times..someone keeps effing it up and I have no idea who or how. So.
I am very apprehensive about what to say to my doctor. I think that all my past appts I've just kinda said things were okay..but now I've gotta tell him I was either in a hurry otr not thinking or just lying to him. Things are "pretty fucking far from okay". (Get the source of that quote and you wina really cute picture that I will post just for you..) Ughhh.
I am so so so dreaduing the gym. It's not even how the machines force me to go harder hadrer harder each tiem..it's how I get no breaks inbetween and can't BREATHE AT ALL. you should not be unable to catch your breath. i don't think that the SmartCurves thing factors in the fact that i SMOKE and sitll have BRONCHITIS. this is a problem..
Well, all those mentions of the Broad&Market style blog paid off; yesterday I got to reprazent Abeno, Osaka (apologies to all the much cooler Abeno kids who wouldn't have looked as chubby as I do in the lead picture; it's all layering, I swear). The most important part of the interview Maggie includes is the bit where I say: "My policy is probably to evoke some kind of otherness and to refute the global monoculture in some way... I’m struggling against it by using other reductive norms like workwear — that’s a bit of a paradox... So workwear, or like, kabuki clothes or gardener’s clothes or peasant’s clothes, or sportswear like golfing wear."
To that list of othernesses I'd like today to add a new category: pilgrimwear. From Friday to Monday I'll be traveling in Shikoku with Hisae and Yoyo (seen above on Christmas day in the amazing tea pavilion that stands in the garden at her family house in Hinoo). Now, art, friendship, hot water and food are really the goals of our "pilgrimage" (we hope to visit the art island of Naoshima and bathe in Shinro Ohtake's amazing bathhouse), but Shikoku is also famous for its 88-temple pilgrimage. Below you can see the traditional white garb of the Shikoku pilgrim. Dōgyō futari on the sign means "two traveling together".
Pilgrimwear is a good dress lexicon to adopt for various reasons. First, it's an ancient dress style, yet not dodo-dead; it's still worn by pilgrims in Japan today. Secondly, it's leisurewear, not workwear. So it avoids the usual recontextualisation paradox by which the look of other people's unfreedom is shiftily reframed as the look of one's own freedom. (To all those wearing jeans, you do realise that you're voluntarily wearing the clothes cotton-picking slaves were forced to, don't you?)
The otherness quotient of pilgrimwear is fabulously high, and yet the look doesn't stifle itself in piety, as, say, priestwear would (though I must say I have a yen for the conch-playing priest's garb in my Tiger Mountain video). Pilgrims, after all, are secular amateurs merely visiting, in a touristic way, religious sites. And as any reader of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales will tell you, pilgrims can be a rowdy, bawdy lot. A religious trip can be a pretext for carousing and even become arousing; in The Art of Love Ovid sees temples as pick-up joints, and Chaucer's set of scabrous stories begins at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where brothels, palaces and cathedrals stood side-by-side. What could be more natural than following the ingestion of incense with the letting-off of sexual steam?
So, although Japanese pilgrims evoke the same kind of ancient otherness the Hasidim do, you don't have to feel like a hypocrite, anti-semite or satirist walking around dressed up as one. You can just be... human.
But don't you have to be super-ascetic if you're going to be a pilgrim? Not really. Modern Japanese pilgrims take taxis, cars, buses and trains on their 88-temple pilgrimage. They eat hamburgers. Buddhism stresses "the middle way", not total asceticism. There was an interesting action recently by Chim↑Pom touching on this. Hisae and I attended the finissage performance for a show the renegade artist group held at Yamamoto Gendai gallery in Tokyo. Good to be a Mummy saw Chim↑Pom collaborating with friends Yasuyuki Nishio, Sachiko Kazama and Yoshimitsu Umekawa to make an exhibition themed around self-starvation.
Motomu Inaoka, a Chim↑Pom assistant, became a living sculpture for the show, losing so much weight during a fast that his ribcage began to poke uncomfortably through his chest skin. The idea of Sokushinbutsu (or "living body Buddha") was that a monk fasts while meditating then dies to become a mummy. A rather scary sculpture was made of Inaoka at his thinnest, but by the time we caught the show he'd put the weight back on again. Chim↑Pom passed a big heap of McDonalds hamburgers out to the crowd during the blow-out finissage party. Munching on this stereotypically monocultural food, I immediately wanted to embark on a fast (followed, perhaps, by a multi-temple pilgrimage) myself. It smelled and tasted like shit.
From the very periphery of my vision, I saw someone sit down at the table next to mine.
Reading a book, I was only dimly aware of his presence at first, but it soon occurred to me that the man was staring into the side of my head, like an off-duty phrenologist who doesn’t believe in a work/life balance.
Too bashful (okay, frightened) to challenge his gaze immediately but too distracted to return to my book, I instead looked straight ahead for a second as if exchanging glances with the studio audience.
As I did so, I realised that the pub was relatively empty. He had selected the table next to mine above all the other tables to choose from. My one free moment in an otherwise hectic week was being tarnished by a staring nutter.
I decided to risk a glance in his direction. I did so with trepidation in case his eyes were mad, whirling pinwheels or ghoulish empty sockets in his head.
But no. Normal human eyes. And as I met his gaze, the man immediately stopped his staring and looked down into his pint instead. At least he wasn’t bonkers enough to think that staring at other people in such close proximity is normal behaviour. In fact, he didn’t look mad at all. He was a youngish man, conservatively dressed and drinking a pint of Ruddles County Ale.
A mad person wouldn’t drink Ruddles would he? Yet he had sat down next to me in an otherwise quiet pub and he had definitely been staring. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and return to my book.
But I couldn’t. I soon felt the tractor-beam tug of his horrible eyes.
Reading Dostoevsky while suspecting being stared at is like trying to urinate in the presence of an expectantly blinking kitten. Despite conscious efforts, it is impossible to relax the correct muscles.
I looked up at him again and he quickly returned his attention to the froth of his Ruddles. It was becoming a fairly silly game.
As if God in his Heaven was tiring of this silly game and had decided to throw in a plot device, I suddenly needed the toilet. I didn’t want to take my coat and bag with me and I had half a pint of my own Ruddles left to enjoy.
I decided to put the man’s staring powers to good use.
“Would you watch my pint while I go to the bathroom, mate?”
He responded with a cordial and perfectly un-insane affirmative gesture. Excellent. A good leader recognises the special skills of his followers and this man was good at staring. He could look at my things and prevent them from being captured by crows while I was micturating.
Upon returning, I was dismayed to find that my pint had gone. The staring man had watched my pint very well. He had watched it disappear into the hands of the glass collector.
I shot the man a “WTF” expression but he seemed too distracted to notice.
“Yes!” he said suddenly. I followed his gaze to a television screen mounted on the wall above my table, upon which a phosphurdot footballer was celebrating his goal.
The mad staring-eyes man had not been looking at me at all. He’d been looking at the screen above my head.
I'm doing a little roundup of print-and-paper today, because it's something I'm fond of, in a retro-sentimental sort of way. I'm particularly interested in print's Unique Sales Proposition in the digital age; what it has to offer post-internet, or alongside-but-distinct-from-internet... if anything? When I "make myself scarce" by ending this blog on February 10th 2010, for instance, will I "graduate" from free to paid, purchasable, print-only writing?
That's what Momo Nonaka (right, above) seems to have done. Momo is an old friend, and from the 90s to the mid-noughties her blog Tigerlily made her one of Japan's best-known culture-bloggers. Now Momo is concentrating on print, and specifically zines. Tigerlily has become a paper magazine store called Lilmag. Momo is using the internet to distribute -- and blog about distributing -- her mags, but the products themselves are made of pure post-internet paper.
My alongside-internet, print-only novel The Book of Jokes gets an interesting review in the January edition of American literary review The Believer. Although The Believer is primarily a print publication, you can read Justin Taylor's review online. The reviews editor has tried an interesting "read-without-prejudice" experiment, sending Taylor my book without its cover or title pages, its spine blacked-out with a sharpie, and a ban on all googling. The result is a review I'm tempted to call "disorienteered", but also a satisfyingly context-free take on a wedge of paper, which is what a book finally is. This review doesn't rewrite the press release, but simply lets the unfolding text lead the reviewer through revulsion, amusement, disorientation, and trains of personal association. It's something I tried myself recently when I wrote a Playground column describing step-by-step my real-time discovery of a band called Hecuba. Taylor links my Book of Jokes to Lynne Tillman, a writer I met a couple of times in London in the 80s, via mutual friends, and who's apparently also written a book based on jokes (1999's No Lease on Life).
Turning to newspapers, the Israeli daily Haaretz mentions me today. Swiss "pop literature" writer Christian Kracht, in an interview with the paper, quotes the whole lyric to my song Germania, which, as I recall, was an attempt to channel a Germanic sensibility I'd found in art by Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys, and imagery from the poems of Paul Celan and Rainer Maria Rilke. Kracht is one of my most important print mentors -- he published my debut short story 7 Lies About Holger Hiller in literary review Der Freud in 2004, and he's the executive editor of the German edition of The Book of Jokes, which will appear this autumn on the Blumenbar / Buenos Aires imprint. More paper!
There's less paper in the world thanks to the official closure last month of ID magazine, the American design magazine to which I contributed regularly. I even managed to get a young Norwegian graphic design collective called Yokoland onto the cover. ID was great to write for, because they paid a dollar a word. This time last year I managed to live for about three months on their fees for three or four easy-to-write articles. The magazine's closure seems to reflect the axiom that anything the internet can do better than print, it will do better than print. Designers are well-served now by design blogs, which they expect to read free online.
Japanese magazines are still my favourite form of print (and since I can't read them, that must mean that print has some sort of talismanic-fetishistic quality for me). In the photo above (Tsutaya's "recommended titles" shelf) you can see the camera jyoshi mags called Phat and Snap. A camera jyoshi is a young woman who's obsessed with cameras and photography. She's about 22, possibly an art student. She usually has an elegant retro model of camera (she prefers film to digital) which may or may not be covered with stickers (as Ume Kayo's is). The only thing she likes more than photography is sitting in old cafes eating the tasty lunch set and leafing through old magazines, or traveling in other Asian countries. Hisae -- essentially a camera jyoshi herself (her photos grace the current edition of Apartamento magazine) -- flipped enviously through Phat and Snap and told me that there weren't all these titles for camera jyoshis when she was in her early 20s. Magazines must be doing something right if they're diversifying titles about obscure dead-tech hobbies.
I showed Maggie from street fashion / interview blog Broad&Market a Japanese mag called Tokyo Graffiti, and we both went into raptures over its current edition. "This is the perfect magazine for me," said Maggie, leafing through pages showing people stopped on the street to talk about what they're wearing, or holding up Gillian-Wearingesque signs stating their worries about the world, or sitting in their bedrooms describing their decoration preferences. Tokyo Graffiti -- which features almost no advertising, though it may be doing some subtle product placement, for all I know -- is the ultimate vox pop magazine, and so far no blog can provide enough research, content, context and detail to endanger it. But after flipping through the whole of Tokyo Graffiti in the act of intellectual shoplifting called tachiyomi ("standing and reading"), Maggie and I -- blogger pirates both -- replaced the mag on the recommended shelf unbought, took a snap of the cover, and resolved to blog about it. Paper is doomed.
Mahika Mano is a hammock cafe in Kichijoji, located on a street illuminated by two huge red "Soapland" signs (a soapland offers rather more intimate comforts, I'm told).
Swinging there with Hisae and Karin Komoto was comfortable!
Yesterday in Osaka we discovered another interesting cafe, Yusoshi, in the basement of the Loop Centre at Tennoji. It's the local branch of a Kyoto cafe which has teamed up with our favourite makers of tabi shoes and socks, Sou Sou, and employs the same mixture of retro and futuristic; you sit on beanbags at traditional low tables illuminated from below, Stanley Kubrick-style.
We had a very long lunch there with our new friend, Maggie, maker of the Philly-based Broad&Market style blog.
Laptops and the Internet provide unparalleled opportunities for mobility. A beautifully designed cloud computing arrangement can be the Escapologist's friend.
There is the concern, however, that most people don't use technology in a way that ensures the greatest benefit. Gadgetophilia and over-dependency come at a high cost and the world could so easily become a bleeping, malfunctioning, information-heavy technomess.
I need to use the Macquarie Dictionary for work, so I couldn't resist the big new fifth edition when I saw it on sale the other day. So big it's an OH&S issue, crammed full of all the words I love to hate.
Today's special, on the way to 'toxaemia'? 'Turd strangler'. Nice.
I have a lot of problems with this article in the NY Times. The rundown is that our choices lie between an old guard of male writers who wrote macho, conquest-minded sex scenes, and the younger generation who wring their hands in guilt about even broaching the subject, as if sex were always synonymous with exploitation. My friend Elspeth noticed that the charts in this article are devoid of any words like "pleasure," and she's absolutely right. I don't think the problem lies between generations as it does with American culture and how it frames sex. In this article, we're stuck with a definition of sex as something done TO someone rather than WITH someone. And that kind of sex is not only subject to the tired old puritanical sin/transgression/guilt trope, it's also very boring. In other words, it's a very Anglo-Saxon way of looking at sex. How we've strayed from the brave example of Whitman!
I want to read books that have a joyful, guiltless view of sex. Americans aren't very well-practiced in this. I also think we seem to view literature in such a dowdy, earnest way in this country. We prize conflict and struggle, since literature and art must somehow be improving and "meaningful". Such an old-fashioned idea. I think that's why I prefer continental European writers like Calvino: his work is smart but light, playful, breezy. Many American writers may react against the old guard, but in doing so they're also playing by the old rules. I'd recommend not playing the game at all.
It's my first day back at work in a week and a half. I am not adjusting well to it. I would rather post about [daughter] and the names she has given her stuffed animals.
Henry Dog
Not a creative name. "Henry" is what is stitched onto his nametag. He is an heirloom toy, [spouse]'s favorite when she was growing up. Now among [daughter]'s favorites, though we have to remind her not to roughhouse with him because "Henry is a very old dog." When [spouse] was little, she elaborated his name to "Henry Jonathan Heff", but [daughter] has simplified it to the more descriptive Henry Dog. Or sometimes, when she's in the mood to be silly, "Hahnrah". Don't ask, I don't get it either.
Deeghee Deeghee Doggie
A present for her second birthday from my surviving pair of grandparents. (She's a lucky kid, to have three living great-grandparents, two on my side and one on her mother's.) This was the first animal she named herself. She gave the name within days of getting the dog. Sometimes, she just shortens it to "Deeghee". It's based, I think, on one of the word games she likes to play--instead of changing the initial consonant to make a funny rhyme, she'll change the vowel sounds to make a nonsense word. Come to think of it, that's probably where "Hahnrah" comes from.
Vanilla
See the monkey in this picture, but imagine it in all-white:
This monkey was given to her as a present by [spouse]'s parents a long time ago, and has long been a favorite. The first Flickr picture I can find with him is from December 2008, so it was probably a Hanuka present. She only gave him his name recently, in the last couple of weeks. Vanilla it is.
Socky
A brown sock monkey, like this, but not exactly:
A recent gift from my sister. Ever since she named Vanilla, we'd been asking her what this monkey's name was (and hoping it would be Chocolate). But this weekend, she finally decided to name him Socky.
She still has a lot of other stuffed animals that aren't really named yet, just referred to by descriptions (e.g., "Siamese Cat," "Gray Cat," etc.)
This morning she brought Deeghee with her to day care, but when the head caretaker, in greeting us, asked what the doggie's name was, [daughter] did not say. I seriously wonder how much, or rather how little, she speaks at all in daycare--and how unlike the girl we know that is.
Had good time at Elaine's party. Then went to bed WAY later than I wanted to. I drank but I didn't feel drunk, and apparently I way overslept..and then I couldn't get oout of bed because I thought it wasn't that late because the clock in our room is wrong..and Ray "The Incident" turned the heat off accidentally. I finally got up at 1 am freezing my ass off. The therm said 50 degrees.
I'm tired of letting people down. Tired of feeling so drained physically and emotionally that I feel like I can't even try to hang out with anyone unless alcohol might be involved. Tired of being SO GD BROKE.
And tired of looking this way. Principally, my body, but also my darkass undereye circles, bitten-to-shit nails, yellow teeth, and hairy legs. Most of that I can change, or try to. And really I feel so proud of myself after I go to the gym. It tells me that I burn more calories each time (522 last time!) and I know I am doing well..but it's SO FUCKING HARD, mainly because it keeps pushing me to go harder, and I frequently have to stop in between machines because I cannot breathe. Literally. I have to stop and try to breathe again. Probably this is connected to being a smoker, but also my bronchitis has made it damn near impossible. I should stay on the dumb antibiotic. I want to be better and be able to breathe at teh gym and not feel like I am dying.
1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before? Forced self to go to gym where it actually tracked my progress. Broke my laptop :(..lost my car forever :(
2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don't even remem what they were. I've got a few..
3. Did anyone close to you give birth, or die? Uhhh. Not anybody really close.. some facebook friends.
4. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? Hate is a strong word..but I have really resentful and angry feelings, yeah.
5. What countries did you visit? Unfortunately, none.
6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009? Money, self-confidence.
7. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Nothing I'd care to share.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Gym..
9. What was your biggest failure? Eh..not going to gym as much as I wanted..not saving any money..
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Fucking bronchitis.
11. What was the best thing you bought? Way to make those of us who have been broke and unable to buy anything significant feel bad. ( CLICK HERE FOR MORE! )
Relax; if you live outside Japan, once you finish this article you'll never have to hear of Flumpool again. That's one of the nice things about being on holiday in a foreign country; things which are destined to persecute the natives, possibly for years, are merely local curiosities for you, the tourist. You can derive some passing amusement from the marketing around Flumpool -- a new band from the Osaka region, completely without musical interest, currently promoting their debut album -- without having the sinking feeling that you're destined to spend several decades either listening to or resisting them.
I made a decision in 1984 to ignore Madonna, you know. I decided she wasn't interesting. I've been living with that decision for 26 years. But ignoring Madonna is not an option in Western culture. Madonna, her management and her marketing people have made absolutely sure of that. There is no freedom of choice when it comes to attention, though there may be freedom of choice when it comes to purchase. As far as I know, none of my money has ever gone Madonna's way. But I've "paid" attention to Madonna. Look, there she is on the subway wall, modeling for H&M! Look, here's a serious, intellectually-respectable book about Islam that talks about her! And here's that song where she paid a bazillion dollars to ruin Abba's "A Man After Midnight" forever! This song sticks in your brain like charred tar! Can we leave the taxi at the traffic lights?
But Flumpool. Flumpool are big, but they're not as big as Smap or Arashi. If you made a decision in Japan to ignore Smap when they came up in the early 90s, well, I'm sorry for you. Smap are on the cover of almost all the TV magazines in Japan this week, as they seem to have been continuously for the last twenty years. (The ones Smap aren't on, Arashi are. And let me remind you that if you chose to ignore Arashi, well, your girlfriend or your wife didn't. Instant couple conflict, as you are daily revealed to be not-Arashi. Thanks, marketing! Thanks for pissing on me from a great height!)
But to get back to Flumpool. You'd think it would be a no-no for a band with "pool" in their name to refer, on their first album sleeve, to the piss mannekin, the Manneken Pis in Brussels. But why not? There's a successful musical called Urinetown, and a piss manifesto. So this band is a pool of piss, and proud of it! They even pun cunningly on the proximity of "piss" and "peace" -- in April they'll play a "Love and piiiis kids' show".
Musically, as the clip above shows, Flumpool are crushingly banal. Their ultra-formulaic songs sound as if they've been written by a machine, and completely exemplify the super-conformist "aggressive normality" which characterises so much of Japanese -- well, let's face it, of all -- commercial culture these days. But if innovation is banished from the music, it's alive and well in the marketing, and that's how we seem to want things.
I went into a branch of HMV yesterday. In stark contrast to all the other shops in the And& shopping centre in Osaka (clothes shops, Muji, Loft, Chisato Tsumori), HMV was quiet as the grave. And I thought to myself: "Was there really a moment when record shops teemed with people, and when a young Me would come here looking for the newest, most exciting things in the world?" There was, but that moment has passed. There will be no more cakes and ale at HMV.
There was also a moment when I was employed as a songwriter for the Japanese market. I'm reminded of it during a business meeting with Sony Music Japan, my worldwide song publisher, in Tokyo. It's a sort of surreal experience. Books about Bob Dylan lie around reception, and somewhere someone's playing The Beatles' Abbey Road album (Sony Music Japan publishes Lennon and McCartney).
Sony Music Japan signed me in 2001 on the expectation that I'd perform as well commercially in the 00s as I did in the 90s, when I wrote a string of hit records for Kahimi Karie. Of course, fashion is fickle, and the Shibuya-kei movement I was associated with got replaced by... well, nothing special. So the big sum of money Sony gave me has never been earned back, and because I'm on a roll-over contract, I stay signed to them forever. I don't mind at all; I get a worldwide music publisher with an impressive name and Japanese connections. But regularly we have these meetings where Sony nudge me gently about the outstanding debt: "So what are we going to do to recoup this advance we paid you, Nick?"
At this moment I remember all sorts of famous Japanese people I've been told like my songs. That sensitive one from Smap, what's his name, the one who reads novels? He once mentioned me in an interview! And Miki Nakatani, is she still making records? She's got good taste! She likes me! Or what about if I wrote for Arashi? My girlfriend would fucking love that! I could even get revenge on Ninomiya for being so pretty by making him sing something stupid and self-effacing!
Sony tell me, gently, kindly, that sure, they have connections to Arashi's management and could play them anything I wrote for them. But they mostly do rap numbers, in Japanese, with fairly generic music. And the days of Japanese bands being impressed by foreign writers and producers are over. I listen to all that, nodding, then ask if perhaps Aoi Yu doesn't want to make a record at some point? She might, thinks my publisher, but her management would probably want it to be a sure-fire hit. Solid, commercial material. We both know that doesn't mean me. (Intriguingly, Sony Music Japan employ their own full-time songwriter, a kid who's sitting on the sofa beside us wearing headphones, making songs on a laptop as we speak. How very Tin Pan Alley! There in the office, under the strip-lights!)
We end the meeting with a compromise; I'll send in an mp3 of me and Kyoka singing Dracula; MTV have asked for some horror film-type track to be used in an ident and who knows, we may be in with a chance.
But, to get back to Flumpool... well, let's not bother. You and I, since we don't live in Japan and are beyond the reach of even its most inventive marketing, need never hear the name Flumpool again. We can let our definition of Japanese music be encompassed by this fabulous 1985 documentary about Ryuichi Sakamoto instead. That and Akio Suzuki banging on a can, Doddodo screaming, some monks playing conch shells, the enchanting story-chanters at the kabuki theatre, and a gorgeously mournful snatch of gagaku.
Download Episode 11: "S is for Science" In which we crack the Neanderthal genome, chat about Neutralinos as if we know what they are, Dan tells of his snowboarding adventures and how he came to be "in great agony", our listeners travel in time and Rob explains his religious epiphany.
My alongside-internet, print-only novel The Book of Jokes gets an interesting review in the January edition of American literary review 
Turning to newspapers, the Israeli daily Haaretz 
happy
Sony tell me, gently, kindly, that sure, they have connections to Arashi's management and could play them anything I wrote for them. But they mostly do rap numbers, in Japanese, with fairly generic music. And the days of Japanese bands being impressed by foreign writers and producers are over. I listen to all that, nodding, then ask if perhaps Aoi Yu doesn't want to make a record at some point? She might, thinks my publisher, but her management would probably want it to be a sure-fire hit. Solid, commercial material. We both know that doesn't mean me. (Intriguingly, Sony Music Japan employ their own full-time songwriter, a kid who's sitting on the sofa beside us wearing headphones, making songs on a laptop as we speak. How very Tin Pan Alley! There in the office, under the strip-lights!)