large prime numbers

eden: Where Are you Andy Warhol?

eden — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:51:33 -0700

Andy Warhol. Superstar. Painted patsy of the 60s. Flaky skin falling off like a bad waxwork, all in white. Soup.
It was a Monday we found him, sitting in a little old people’s flat. Blanket covering his legs, no wig at all. He was shivering and staring out the window onto the people outside the blindfolded curtains.
“I’m cold”.

The 60s weren’t roaring all about him, more like moaning delicately. A picture of a superstar in the corner- blowing up slowly. A couple of prints hung up on flower covered walls that had one too many nights out and far too many vodkas. The wallpaper’s kind of dark- the entire flat it. It’s submersed in the depths of suburbia, I can tell you that much.

“Who are you?”

We try and introduce ourselves as well as one can when really one just walked into his flat. The man isn’t disturbed, just looks on, in Andy Warhol’s Patented mock expression of boredom. Maybe he really is bored?

He asks us if we want some tea. I don’t drink tea I say, but my partner says she’ll have some.
So he kind of stumbles up and shuffles around (brown tartan slippers), and goes into his little old people’s kitchen- motel kitchens. So tiny they look like they’re made for a child, a foetus even.

Well, I heard some strands of some music coming of there. An old radio, maybe. Record player. Just propped up on the coffee table- all glossy brown mock-wood surfaces, looking like it came from an advertising firm in the 70s- just propped up, is a copy of “The Velvet Underground and Nico” with the sticker still on it.

“Peel off and see” says Andy behind us. His voice is like the absent minded 5 year old professor/fish monger grown up. I’ll admit that it’s kind of creepy. Like if the wind was a 80 year old child- that’s Andy Warhol’s voice.

“Well, if you don’t want to you don’t have to guys. But boy oh boy it’s fun”.
I tell him that his record could fetch a lot of money.
“Oh. Ok. Why don’t you do it anyway, huh?”
He shuffles back into the room- tick tock- and sort of slumps down. His glasses are still the same as they were last time everybody saw him.
So we peel the sticker- me and her, I mean. Andy’s still on the couch, watching the two T.Vs that are muted at the back of the room, beside some horrid pot plant that was all shrivelled and simply beyond dead.
And peeling the sticker, well, it’s a great feeling. Illicit. Illegal. And Andy sort of just half-smiles.

The record player’s playing “I like Traffic Lights”. The song goes: “I Like Traffic Lights, I Like Traffic Lights”- just some old fart standing there singing that by himself. Then a chorus joins in “He likes traffic lights…he likes traffic lights”. It’s like a pack of farmers travelling the London are singing it, admiring the new fangled technicolour traffic lights.
“Isn’t it great?” says Andy. And he means it.

At whim I say “Where are you Andy Warhol?” and he says, “Right here. Wanna play ball?”
And there’s Andy Wahol, exploding at a spectacularly slow speed like a supernova of pop.

And there’s us- me and her. Andy asked us to stay the night- lonely old man. So we did.
And he’s still out there drinking his cup of tea, content to watch the 6 o’clock news (“isn’t the news interesting?”).

She’s a red haired fire-queen with a slow easy confidence. I’m me. We’re sitting on the bed admiring our situation- in Andy Warhol’s house.
In his fucking house.
On the bed.
Throughout the house Velvet Underground is playing, and we start to fuck.

In comes Andy Warhol, and takes photos with his digital camera. His rubber- wax hands click the trigger. And again. Again. Again.
His eyes sit unmoving, his body a portrait a statue. Blink. Blink.
His wig sits upon his head. Click.
He pushes the trigger again.

eden: The Superman

eden — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:55:23 -0700

It is exactly 12.20 AM and I’m going to write about something.
I think I started to grasp what “cool” is when I was at a friends house- I was 8 or 9- and we were playing with his skateboard (I have never been on a skateboard since, or before. It was that one time). I was going down the hill on it with my knees trembling at the top of the skateboard like I was on a very small sort of boat, and then somehow I was on my stomach flying like superman.
What an American sort of story, I’m thinking to myself. Next up we’ll have cookies and homemade lemonade.
Of course, I’m not American so what happened next after congratulating ourselves was that we were invited back into my friend Tom’s perfectly inhuman house. I remember leather couches, and lots of white and metal. The kitchen I was fascinated with; this was when everyone in our town was going for white-washed appliances and wooden cupboards and such and such. And here was this kitchen with shiny, shiny black and silver knobs and silver fridges and dishwashers. They had a lemonade maker as well, but what’s going to happen next is not the drinking of lemonade but the drinking of a ginger ale as dry as it could possible be. I’m amazed it was a liquid. It felt like drinking towels.
And to go with the ginger ale was different cheeses all cut up very nicely, thank you very much. I remember the “leavers dinner” at the primary school I went to (ie. From ages 5-9. Or 5-10. Can’t remember) where the ladies put out all this cheese that nobody would eat. It was probably damn expensive too.
Nowadays I’m fond of putting expensive cheese onto pizzas. Camembert- though not really expensive- works well on it.
Anyway. So I’m sitting at Tom’s parents outdoor table and eating the win- ginger ale and cheese (honestly, I really wanted to say “wine and cheese” there. Where I live it’s so drummed into the poor, poor population that we “make the best wine and cheese around” that one can’t seemingly co-exist without the other. Like bobs-and-bits. And there’s another one too; now there’s “wine and cheese”. That’s the local authorities for you) feeling pretty sophisticated. You could throw on a jazz record of say, Thelonious Monk and it wouldn’t be out of place. The only music I remember hearing at Tom’s house was Michael Jackson, though. That was “cool” for us then too. It still is. It was all Thriller stuff, mostly- except the MIDI-ish ramblings on the Sega of “Moonwalker” of songs such as “Smooth Criminal”. The best part of that game is that you could throw off your hat- al la “Billie Jean” and just kill somebody. Just like that. WHAM.
I still have a tape of “Thiller” that I borrowed from him.

I wonder where that tape has got to. The case is probably dusty and Michael’s pristine white suit probably hasn’t seen the light of day in years.

Throughout the years “cool” has changed. I got into Jazz. Rock. That weird Japanese stuff of Tim’s that he sent me. More classical. Games that weren’t on Sega (I still remember Alex the Kid with fond memories, even though I have no idea what the hell you do in the game. I think you can transform into another creature or something. That could be a totally different game. Probably is. In fact- I played “Moonwalker” on an emulator last year- mainly to do the hat thing. It wasn’t the same).

Now “cool” is Bob Dylan’s ray-ban wayfarers and skinny jeans on a brunette. Beside her Miles Davis is playing “Summertime” and Coco Chanel is smoking at the side of a little table talking to a German man. Oh so noir.

eden: a review of the dior homme fall 08/09 show

eden — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:52:15 -0700

I could write a lot of dust about the Dior Homme show.
Dior Homme was a display of a very refined tackiness. A very tunnelled tackiness, targeted with one specific vision. It's worth noting that Karl Lagerfeld wore vintage Dior Homme, from when Hedi Slimane designed for the house. Karl Lagerfeld, the man whose mouth becomes an opening for a verbal hurricane when he speaks about "The Now" and why he only wears clothes from this season. Yet recent Dior Homme isn't in "The Now" at all. It ain't where it's at.

It started with the pants. That's what I saw first- everything else comes after that. In my head I have visions of MC Hammer type affairs, in metallics. And behind those pants- so big that they're in front of everything else- I see ill fitting black suits. A tat of fabric here, a bit here. They aren't clear in any case. Even if I went back and looked at those suits again, I wouldn't really remember them. They're a forgettable person.

I'm sure you can have damn stylish forgettable people, too. There's a girl who passed me on the street, I only remember her red jacket. There's millions of people who've passed me on the street, and I don't remember too many of them. Most of 'em don't stick out in my mind as the Dior Homme collection is.
See, the Dior Homme collection is an obnoxious forgettable person. You'll remember the smell of it.

The smell of this collection is a girl- a groupie- who's having sex with a rapper. It's the smell of the girl as she turns 40 and her she's telling the story in a bar someplace. It's the smell of the girl post-sex with rapper.

Really, the guy who wears these sort of clothes will look like a sleaze. That guy who slicks his hair back and tries to pick you up with his voice oiler than his hair. I almost think that the clothes themselves are trying to pick me up. "Do you want to go out, Eden?" I respond with a slap.

I was watching the excellent "IT crowd" last night, and one of the characters was trying on varying forms of dicky glasses which made them look like an asshole (this was the point, because he said women liked bastards more than any other type of a guy and was trying to prove it. Just go watch it. Watch all of 'em).
Anyway, maybe the character should try on glasses from the Dior Homme show. Here we have varying forms of bastardry. Put these glasses that look like rejects from a B-science fiction movie on, and you'll look like an idiot! The sort of idiot of shaves his hair short, dyes it platinum blond, and puts those glasses on and does the patented "cool guy" look. You know the one. You've seen it all the time, down the street. The guy walking like an ape is probably doing it.

One reviewer (for style dot come, I believe) said the designer "tried too hard".
I've been avoiding saying this for the entire review, because I despise the phrase. It's a lazy way of saying you don't like something without saying why.
Yet I need to say that the designer- Kris, did try too hard with this collection. Or he didn't try at all.
Maybe he tried to redefine what Dior Homme is all about, when in reality he managed to remind us what was so great about Hedi's collections.
There’s nothing wrong with redefining the Dior Homme brand- this isn’t Chanel. Before Hedi it was all licensed out clothes sold at duty free shops. Plenty of ties, white business shirts and not much else.
There’s nothing redefined here anyway. In future, I suspect this collection will be politely forgotten. That’s what the fashion people do.

eden: They say Marc Jacobs is the new Andy Warhol

eden — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:46:34 -0700

I've been listening to David Bowie's song "Andy Warhol" a lot lately. The chorus just won't get out of my head ("Andy Warhol looks a scream...hang him on my wall"), and that's fine because I quite like it. If it was something like "Nature", that nostalgia-tinged piece of sound which has been used in countless New Zealand commercials - including a milk commercial for (what else) Nature's Fresh - which still haunts me to this day, then that wouldn't be fine. At Primary School we were forced to sing "Nature", by a teacher who presumably had sadistic tendencies. (And that song stuck in my head for days because of her).

Of course, if you hear a song too many times it eventually loses its meaning (just ask Bob Dylan). It's the same with repeating a single image ad nauseam (I'd say "just ask Andy Warhol" apart from he's dead right now).
I'm seeing the same sort of repetition-for-meaninglessness with Mr. Marc Jacobs, the subject of my last review. Here's this blue-haired forty-something year old, with a toned body and plenty of superficialness. He rains superficialness. The man designs for Louis Vuitton.

How can one design Louis Vuitton bags anyway? It's like trying to redefine McDonald's. The whole concept, the whole dream of Louis Vuitton and McDonald's, is laid out for anyone to see.

I'm not saying I don't like Marc Jacobs, the man. I've never met him. He likes Spongebob Squarepants, so he can't be that bad.
I don't know him. Maybe nobody does because Mr. Jacobs has created that blue-haired persona for the world to see. No person has blue hair; brands do. We've got Marc Jacobs: The Brand. That's what the world sees. Trouble is, Brand Jacobs looks like a bit of a fuck up. It's like Marc dug right to the bottom of the bargain basement bin at the largest superstore in the world, and picked out a brand that was tossed off by the marketing version of Jackson Pollock on a bad day. The brand is like those commercials that appear on late night TV, where the advertising slots are cheap enough that ma-and-pa funeral establishments can show their commercials made with Windows Movie Maker and a camcorder.

To answer the semi-question posed in the title: Marc Jacobs is not the new Andy Warhol, because his brand is too messy. He almost has the symptom that 90% of fashion design students have: trying too hard.
Karl Lagerfeld is the new Andy Warhol (apart from the fact that he's only a few years younger than Warhol). More on that later.

Jacobs has become meaningless because he pops up in every 2nd magazine vaguely related to fashion. The clothes haven't. Actually I don't really see the main Jacobs line being worn much (readers: post in photos of non-models or Victoria Beckham wearing Marc Jacobs clothes! And I don't mean Marc by Marc, either). I want to ask him how it feels to be him. How does it feel to be someone you're not? How does it feel to design fast-fashion? (read: Louis Vuitton). You, Marc, are this creative, creative guy and you're doing....all this? What drives you to do it?

"Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

- Andy Warhol

And Louis Vuitton sure does make a lot of money. Maybe Marc is the new Andy Warhol. And Karl is Karl.

(Inspiration for article here: http://www.wwd.com/issue/article/125006?src=newsletter,

eden: a review of the fall 08 Marc Jacobs show (OR, NEW FASHION JOURNALISM)

eden — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:55:28 -0700

It's almost in slow motion, the models walking out with impassive dead faces looking pretty glum. It's so teenage melancholy. They're worried about something; are they walking into the Principal's office to be punished? Are they about to lose their virginity? Most models look glum, but these are particularly so. It's as if they are self-aware mannequins, realizing that their only purpose is to display clothes that some rich person is going to buy.
Holy Mother of God, these are models on a murderous prowl and they're icy calm about it - and they've got sharp, gleaming things around their necks.

The clothes they're wearing might even be made by these animated mannequins. They are all exaggerated shapes, dressing gown fabrics and headbands that are so home video VHS aerobic instructor that it's almost endearing. This is chic by being anti-chic. Nothing here looks in the least bit showy, fabulous, sexy. It doesn't look like fashion. The colours comprise those that adorn grandmother hats and matronly skirts; browns that cling to the tattered suitcases of tired men. I hated those colours the first time I saw them and I still do. They evoke memories that just aren't chic. These memories are warm and fuzzy - very homely. What they really make me want is some pumpkin soup and homemade bread.

There's no dream in this collection. It's not something you want to dream about. It's a dream within reality, within a dark room where there is no inspiration; a harsh reality from a walk in a park where a rich boy is being beaten by a thug with a family to feed and all the trees are burning down. It's cold, concrete reality. This collection is about proles - think 1984 - infesting the establishment and changing the way the establishment dresses. One can imagine the lords and ladies of the city arriving in their carriages of steel and Italian leather to a function held by one of these proles: Marc Jacobs.
He doesn't so much dazzle them as infect their collective minds with subversive takes on their own aristocratic uniforms. Here comes the white coat, over sized. Here's a dress with a toothpaste top. Here's a dress that's grey, uniform grey. Not "Perl grey" or any other glamorous colour that may inhabit the wardrobes of these lovely ladies and gents. It is the grey of smoke vomiting factories. The real genius of this ruse is that it's a fusion of two polar opposites: the proletariat and the bourgeois.

This feeling of adolescent tragedy lingers throughout the show - perhaps it's the headbands. It's in the sullen faces of the models. It rings out in the Sonic Youth playing too loudly. "Revolutionary" teenagers changing the world from the inside. Teenagers like (forty-five year old) Marc Jacobs. Maybe Jacobs is trying to change fashion from the inside. Change what, though? It's still expensive as hell so if you want to make a rebellious statement in Mr. Jacobs's latest you better be rich - revolution for the bourgeois!

So, I guess the question is: Do I like this collection? I don't think you can like it, even though some pretentious figures of the fashion establishment will undoubtedly say they do, because it's Marc Jacobs and oh my God doesn't everyone just love him? Because it is Marc Jacobs you are almost forced to like it, if only to save face. If it was some unknown designer, well, the collection probably would've been trashed, burned, and buried.

I don't like it, but I do respect it. This collection is about ideas rather than clothes. They're integral in presenting said ideas, but at the end of the day you're missing the point if you judge the clothes by accepted fashion standards. It's a necessary collection. For Marc Jacobs it is a sort of evolution of his ideas, not a growing up as much as it is a twist to the left and a hop to the right. It's not necessary for fashion but someone would've made a collection like this at some point. It was inevitable.

This is the collection of an outsider.

Mr. Apol: SAVAGERY IN THE DARK HEART OF THE SOUTH

Mr. Apol — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:38:27 -0700

An orgiastic vortex of twenty-four hour violence, unneccessary drug use and blood-drenched psychosis centering on one boy, a girl with a penis, a suit jacket haunted by the ghost of memphis blues, a robbery at a pharmacy, a den of sunshine addicted lunatic theives, gravel roads to nowhere, burned out shells of abandoned factories, labyrinths, menthol cigarettes, a woman who has unintentionally switched bodies, a talking cat and a single guitar case that may or may not contain a high yield nuclear device.

None of these events, people or objects are related beyond a tenuous connection, but they will be brought together against their will.

Who will survive, and what will be left of them?

Mr. Apol: fangs and fireflies

Mr. Apol — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:53:56 -0700

I am chewing on a pen when he walks up to me and smiles and he's got the most beautiful olive eyes I've ever seen. A bit too tall for my tastes, but he's got that whole walking-up-to-a-girl thing down just perfectly. You know the walk I'm talking about? Well, maybe you don't, maybe you've never seen it, but forget about it. It's not important. The important thing is that he looks strange – out of place, out of time – like he probably shouldn't be in this juice bar on the corner of 13th and Magnolia. He looks like someone out of a dinosaur's wet dream. I wouldn't be able to tell you what was so strange about him; it wasn't something you could really pin down. Clothes that were a few seasons behind the curve, or maybe ahead of the curve, these things are cyclical anyway. His eyes remind me of a violent upheaval; a nightmare shut up into the twin coin-lockers set into his face.

"Can I help you?" I ask him.

"Yeah, can you make me an orange smoothie?"

"Sure," I can hear myself thinking, even thought it comes out of my mouth as a sort of unintelligible half-mumble.

I turn around and start looking for the ingredients. God, if there's one thing you'll let me do perfectly, just this time, let me make a perfect orange smoothie. I open the bone colored cabinets under the counter and get two oranges. I get milk from the fridge and ice from the freezer compartment and dump the milk and the ice into this blindingly neon-green blender by the sink. My hands grab an orange and go to juice it and the orange does the strangest thing – it slips right through my fingers and falls apart into eight perfect slices. These little slices shatter into sixteen when they slide out of my hand and hit the countertop. The pieces tumble to the floor, shattering again into perfect halves as they strike the tile floor.

Speechless, I go to juice the other, too shocked to clean up the first shattered orange. This orange suffers the same strange fate. Eight slices fall through my fingers to the counter. I try to catch them as they fall, flailing my arms like a coked-up valley girl, but I'm not able to hold on. Some melt in my hands like icy flakes in a late spring flurry; others fall right through my fingers, slipping out of my grasp like wet soap. I grab more oranges from under the cabinet. These oranges fare no better than their fellow citrus. All of them split and slide one after another right through my grasping hands, eventually shattering into pieces too small to make out. I get the impression that they are separating all the way down to the individual atoms that made up the oranges, splitting down to the lonely quarks and perhaps farther than that. Elementary particles are nature's wallflowers.

The gorgeous man behind the counter seems confused, but keeps smiling. For a brief moment his teeth look like fangs, glinting in the orange and red afternoon halflight; shining like an insane cartoon wolf. The bell on the door to the juice bar rings and he is normal again, the fleeting fevered hallucination becoming an uneasy memory.

"I'm sorry, but the oranges keep falling apart."

"Well, I suppose that can't be helped, can it?"

The way he says this causes a shiver to slide up my spine.

"No, I suppose not," I say, embarrassed at my failure.

"Does this happen often on your world?"

"No, not usually," I say, confused by his strange question. Maybe he's just foreign and his English slipped. He did have a barely noticeable, unfamiliar accent.

"Well, what would you suggest?"

"How about a banana smoothie?"

"Banana."

"Yes, banana."

"Is that something you would eat with a spoon?"

"Well, no, not usually."

"Then, what is banana? If you don't mind me asking, that is."

I look at him strangely, but he seems completely geniuine. Maybe they don't have bananas where he comes from.

"Bananas are a fruit too, like an orange. They are yellow and long and you have to peel them."

"Like an orange, but they are not round?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

He looks puzzled, but somewhat reassured.

"Well, they're different in that they're soft and mushy when you eat them, not all juicy like an orange."

He looked more puzzled now.

"But this is a juice bar, is it not? Why would you stock a fruit that is not juicy?"

Actually, this makes a lot of sense.

"I'm sorry, that was sort of rude of me," he quickly apologizes. There's that smile again.

"Sure, I'll have a banana smoothie."

None of the bananas fell apart, and the smoothie came out perfectly. I was quite pleased with myself, though still somewhat disturbed by the shattered oranges. I found it really strange that this pretty boy didn't know about bananas. I got curious.

"So, where are you from?" I ask, attempting to sound flirtatious as I ring him up.

He looks me dead in the eyes.

"Another planet."

I stare at him blankly and chew on aforementioned pen for a second.

"Well, in that case meet me tonight, nine-thirty, 1774 Camellia St. There's a party you should be at," I reply.

He just smiles again, puts on a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses and walks backwards towards the door, eyes locked on mine. He stops before reaching it and says "I'll consider it," before turning around.

The sliding glass door opens and he steps out into the humid, blood-drenched afternoon sky. I switch on the store radio and "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads starts playing. People on the sidewalk outside pass by the windows in single-file. The juice bar is almost empty except for a few weird souls, all drinking fruit juice from the same beige and red one-hundred percent recycled paper cups, sipping life to the beat of the music. The television hanging from a jumble of wires above one of the tables is running the afternoon news silently. The female news anchor mouths the words to the camera, a mute trapped in a vacuum. The story is about a candle factory that caught on fire outside of Denver. The fire has spread out of control and is now heading towards a residential area. Helicopter footage shows flames creeping up on McMansions and swimming pools, closer and closer to people's culminated lives and dogs chained up in the backyard, barking at the fire but the fire's not listening. I am gripped by the extreme irony of the moment when a car bomb goes off outside and the windows explode inward with a scream, broken into a million glittering stars as the afternoon light refracts through the pieces.

Car alarms go off all at once in a cacophony of noise as the ground vibrates with the pressure of the explosion - an impromptu concert in the streets. People are screaming and running to and fro; blurs of white and blue going in all directions at once. Everyone in the bar who hasn't been knocked unconscious by the blast is staring at the fire raging outside. There is a man lying on the pavement in front of the juice bar. His right forearm is missing, now just a shredded stump oozing red and black blood. He is writhing on his back, pushing himself along the concrete with his rubber soles. He is screaming too, but like the lady in the television (and now a story about corruption in the city council, green pleads guilty, four murders this week, details at nine) he is just mouthing the words while "Burning Down the House" continues to play, louder than the chaos outside, louder than the ringing in my ears. It is all I can hear, the rest of the world is a just a tiny smudge in a spiral galaxy that's slowing down every day. I realize that we're all riding a carousel that should've been stopped a long time ago, before the first man ever beat another one to death for taking his fruit.

"People on their way to work. Baby what did you except? Gonna burst into flame!"

I stand there, chewing on my pen and watching the ragged man. The scene plays itself out over and over again in my head, in slow motion at first and then quickly, filled with jump-cuts like a French New Wave and I am wondering what dress I should wear to Johnny Taragon's party tonight.

"Some things sure can sweep me off my feet."

108: \"love in the time of global warming\"

108 — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:52:36 -0700

Where do you want this?

I'm not sure where any of this goes:

Glaciers on opposite poles have been holding a tenuous argument for millenia; a representative of the North Pole faced -- well, any direction, really -- and whispered a terrible lie; it would take a hundred years to reach the south pole, and what happens then, no one born nearly thirty years before yesterday has half of a right to imagine. The sky over Los Angeles was the color of recycled newsprint, late one night, and formless rumors kicked up inexplicable action and sound. A cat yearning for something unshapeable, a vintage record player playing a dead jazz lady's not-best work on a rooftop far away, police sirens looking for something by making themselves heard; me sitting on a sofa listening to the sound of the needle of the cosmos in the record groove of the earth, everything distant reduced to a near-mute wailing treble squeal. In several weeks' time, back in Tokyo, I'd arrive at the somewhat-adult, existentially horrifying decision of how, precisely, I'm supposed to throw away my garbage can. Seriously, what do I put it in? Back on that night, with a window open, a diet root beer, wildfire smoke clouding the Hollywood sign, the full moon beating like a human heart, the minute ticks of the earth's second hand came within audible range. The shotgun holed up next door, contemplating suicide and unable to bend his barrel to fit his will, instead took it upon himself to begin reading the phone book, in as soft a voice as he could manage. The sky shook subtly with the passing of the months-long words of glaciers.

Days later I'd be stopped at a shoulder on US Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, confronted by the inverse of existence, at two in the morning, maybe mere miles from Santa Cruz, with less than a tenth of a tank of gas. We turned off the headlights; after a few minutes, the stars were all over the place. The ocean roaring two thousand feet below, barely a guardrail on the road, no electric lights, no passing cars. I recalled something I felt like I'd overheard, though really it was being presented to me as a paying customer at a planetarium that shared the top floor of a shopping-building with an aquarium that looked from the outside like all the glass within was green: out by Ayer's Rock, down in Australia, late at night, they'll escort people out by candlelight and serve them a full-course meal; at one point during dessert, they blow out all the candles, leaving the people alone with the stars and feelings, resembling memories, of everyone else around them. The narrator, back then, had recommended this to me, if I were ever in Australia, and the suggestion -- as I wrote earlier -- felt cheap, and immediately impressed all the experience of having worked as a busperson in said wild outdoor restaurant for three decades before giving in to some coincidental cancer. More often than not, these days, in this information age, a good idea is more than just that: it's a suggestion of a life spent in its servitude, carefully waiting for it to show you something. That night under the stars on Highway One, there were other problems more real even than the sound of crushing waves thousands of feet below, like "not enough gasoline", or "no towns in sight"; times like those really make you wonder about what it's like when you die, like, if you're still worried about your taxes. Surrounded by the suck of nature, focused on the blow of everyday living. The revelation of how many thousands of stars, exactly, we beings unable to squint through the haze we deal with every night in our convenient metropolises, however, was, in hindsight, more than a little interesting.

An hour later, there was a hotel involved, and then a diner in Santa Cruz with vegetarian omelettes; seven hours after lunch, we were looking for parking spaces on Hollywood Boulevard, and it occurred to me how fierce are these peaks and valleys of life. San Francisco had been lovely, like something out of a movie where you keep thinking somebody is going to die, and eventually, somebody does, and you're all swirly for a few hours as you drink your coffee and look out a window on a world with nothing shinier than glass, and the sun's gone down; days before that, we'd been accosted on the way to the Delicious Robust Vegan Breakfast by two organic-looking females who said they worked for Greenpeace, and said this with confidence just two days after we'd purchased a fur coat for seventy-five dollars.

I don't hate animals, really; I hate the way they taste. I hate chewing. I hate the juices leaking down my throat. I've eventually come to not feel ashamed of telling people that I became a vegetarian because I didn't like eating meat, not because I don't like to see creatures un-created. It used to be somewhat shameful of a thing; I'd tell people I didn't eat meat because I was a vegetarian, and that I was a vegetarian because I didn't eat meat. As the tens digit of my age morphed slowly into a two, however, I found myself surrounded with smarter people, people who asked questions, and so I had to almost entirely give up. I used to tell people -- this is when I was a child -- that I hated music, for example. There wasn't really any reason -- the truth is that I enjoyed listened to particular songs in three-second segments at a time, absorbing the tiniest quirks of every sound. If people who "liked" music owned a lot of records, I must have been a pathetic enemy of the industry to be fully satisfied with just a crumb of one. Eventually, I realized that I have these Steve-Albini-like ears, and I've been too dull to really grasp the meaning of that. In the same way, I used to declare verbatim that I hated the idea of veganism, because it's just too much paraphernalia. Now I don't know so much, anymore. After traveling up and down a coast and experiencing the latest revolutions in imitating meat, I don't find it nearly so silly anymore to give something up only to embrace something that aspires to it. My earliest experiences with vegans perhaps left my eardrums scarred, and I recall that period of a few years, before I gave up saying anything to anyone, for a while, where I groaned at the mention of the Detroit Tigers because a fellow Army kid who'd spent his first speaking years in Detroit had, in addition to being summarily smitten with the team, also once carved a large gash in the back of my neck by pranking me with a snow-boulder on the way home from school. The orientation experience with vegans was about as similar to that as something can be, without involving violence: I was sitting in a corner in the break room at the retail establishment where I worked, reading Eiji Yoshikawa's biography of Musashi Miyamoto; a pierced and bloated vegan asked what I was reading, and I said it was a slightly fictionalized biography of a Japanese swordsman; the vegan turned up its nose and asked, in dead-seriousness: "How can you read that? Don't you know what those people do to dolphins, and whales?"

This particular variety of knee-jerking was no one's fault, really. Years flow by, and I find that vegan meat imitations are basically meat without all of the characteristics of meat that I despise. There are wholesome atoms, and even entire wholesome molecules, that appear in limited quantities in every other herb of this earth, and the vegan, in a desire to eat the essence of life -- to eat the condensation of that jewel of creation that makes people believe a cow's flesh is delicious -- they gather it all up, and compress it into something you can sink your teeth into. For the longest time, while never stopping to consider myself an open- or closed-minded person, I'd associated the act of veganism with one ignorant youngster (and that ignorant youngster's dozen friends): gritting teeth and succumbing to a desire to believe in something, bearing the burden of a restricted culinary vocabulary, growing thickly fat with repeated binges on the one thing that tastes good enough to make you forget where you came from.

The Greenpeace girls wanted me to "get involved", to donate a little bit of money, to read their newsletter, at the very least. I would have taken the newsletter, and probably read it cover-to-cover, if they had been offering me a free sample. When finally confronted with the question, as to whether I cared or not about what was happening to the world, I answered yes, and though at a certain point I began to ponder what precise sentences would produce the event of these two girls losing their clothes in my presence, that reply continued to not be a lie. I mentioned something about residing in Japan, and they asked me if I had any idea what those people do to dolphins. "They're not all porpoise-stabbers or manatee-rapists over there, you know", I managed to imply. These girls took this implication as the most obvious thing in the world, implying on their own that just because everyone doesn't do something doesn't mean that no one does do it.

Some five months later, I'd be back in Japan, with new hair, new clothes, a new job, a new apartment, and new problems, and I'd be at an off-shore slice of America, viewing Greenpeace's motivation in close-up. I was at Yokota Air Base, eating Taco Bell, which has become something of a regular ritual. In between fervent burrito-related mouth-breathing sessions, I saw kindness deep within my heart, kindness toward pizza, and so I purchased a slice of cheese from the food court's New York pizzeria. Why they don't have pizza in Japan, I'll never understand. As nine out of ten "blogs about Japan" will tell you, people "over here" line up for six hours whenever they open a donut shop, and they're still not fat. I was applying Tabasco and crushed red peppers to my pizza when a woman's order number was called, and she stepped up to receive her stack of six pizzas. She herself was thin, and somewhat beautiful. I wondered about the skin distribution among her family. She asked the old misplaced Korean behind the pizza-counter: "Do you have any paper plates"? The Korean woman held up a triangular paper plate with high cardboard ridges. "We have this." Not only that one, she had nearly hundreds more. The woman made a sound like someone had just suggested she just give her baby a tracheotomy now, because it might get in a car accident someday. She swiftly turned around, and was gone.

I sat down with my own Delicious Triangle and thought, semi-hardly, about shapes. The people of the world just generally don't have a knack for geometry. The woman had wanted a circular plate, because that had been the shape of the plates of her childhood years; for very much the same primordial reasons, the man who had originally suggested that maps of the London subway system be presented as straight lines with names and numbers for each stop was dismissed as a lunatic and thrown to the dogs of criticism. No, said the then infantile London transit authority, people want and need to see the train system as God had intended it, as a map, as geography. Little did the rulemakers know: the age of geography has been dead in the ground for centuries. Now that we know what is where in this world, we no longer need to worry about getting there. Boarding a train is a decision we make: we know why we're going where we're going (to Work), and we know how (by train). We don't decide to go to Russell Square because Russell Square is geographically north-northwest of Holborn, we decide to go there because That's Where We're Going. Geography isn't a product of literature; it's a tool of the mind. We remember the difference between the resting places of our Bibles and our Shotguns the way the old explorers might have distinguished between an island and a peninsula.

Years later, here I am, in a country where the sick diamond of the center of its central city is rendered icon-like as a perfect circle; time has shifted, the world grows warmer, and little by little, people become at home loving and knowing nothing of the spaces between places. Every punctuation point where the Machine stops is dear and remembered to us. In this pear-shaped world, there exist no straight lines; we can run in one direction, starting now, and never see the same place twice before we die.

It's in only in this world that rock and roll can exist. I punctured a frigid winter with habitual finger-warming, and there are a whole lot of things that, for whatever reason, I'm no longer afraid of; I'm lucky that I never realized I was afraid of anything before accidentally surmounting those fears. Only a few fragments need to slide into place before this long reverse slow-motion take pauses to reveal a man taking a sip from a glass of water. I've seen and heard many things since the last time I've written something here, though at the end of the day, I'm starting to shock myself with my accidental non-desire to surprise anyone else. I've been eating protein, and doing push-ups and sit-ups, and straightening my hair. I live, now, in the town of Ogikubo, west of Shinjuku, close to Kichijoji, Koenji, and Nakano -- namely, the only three places I ever really go for anything. I've recently been employed as a geometry assessor for a group of people I like for simple reasons. It's amazing how many Microsoft Excel spreadsheets get made in the name of making something or other easier to understand, and it's doubly amazing how much money people are willing to pay an already-rich man to scream in the face of bullshit. As a rock-and-roller might have sung once (and if he hadn't, he should have), "No matter what words they use to make you leave the building, if you already have money, you can't be 'fired'". With great freedom comes great freedom: I'm pulling in six figures to, for lack of a better word, wake up at noon. That I possess the gall to still wake up at six in the morning and earn my own money, rendering a workday at an "office" moot, is what makes me what I am. It's an imploding kind of state of being: in order to be forgiven for perpetual laziness, one has to keep one's nose to the grindstone. Again with the ancient corollaries, the Red Queen telling Alice she has to run as fast as she can just to stay where she is. Man, fuck literature, for rendering my every toilet-time musing plagiarism.

We call this one

"love in the time of global warming"
『地球温暖化の時代の愛』

A vegan cafe opened near my house the other day, by chance, on the very day I tried to walk home from my company office's cherry-blossom-viewing party and failed semi-miserably. I realized how blessed I am by being allowed to keep living, long after the gun is empty and the enemies are ghosts; a suburban neighborhood I didn't know existed, like the remains of a microwave oven excavated strata beneath a stone pitchfork. Prior to this I'd sat and/or stood barefoot on a blue tarp on a rooty half-hillside overlooking a canal into which pink flowers were blizzarding. Just six months after the first time in my life when "Later" turned into one whole year, here I am thinking about dozens of decades at once. How long will it take for this, right here, to get old? There was that samurai in that Tom Cruise film who realized that every cherry blossom was perfect; I say he, and everyone within electrical conducting distance of his outstretched blade, was thinking way too much about everything. There I was, in the presence of the president of a corporation, on a "professional" excursion, wearing nylon Adidas pants and a found Burberry scarf tucked into a stained, purchased-at-disgusting discount Lacoste sweater, lemon yellow. The night before I'd paid a man on the internet $500 for eyeglass frames; it took six hours of dealing with a Yahoo.co.jp proxy computer algorithim, firing blunt missives into the mid-night, making choices from drop-down menus, to which the man replied with drop-down menu choices of his own. He had enabled any and all security protocols: he wasn't taking any chances. My guess is that he had never had a computer virus, nor had he ever known someone who had. He had, however, known someone who knew someone who had: not only did he not want me to know his name, his geographic location (within a hundred kilometers, anyway), or even his email address, he didn't want to know me, either. Drop-down menus contained more than enough choices for him to convey the absolute, most horrible, deepest apology allowed by these twelfth-century semantics: the eyeglass frames with solid gold studs in them, which he had advertised as including the original clear display lenses, in fact did not contain the lenses. Through the power of selecting multiple two-Chinese-character items, I was able to tell him that I planned to purchase prescription lenses, anyway, from the very shop that had produced those ultra-rare frames in the first place. The man responded, and the algorithm produced a sentence of startling clarity: "Since the item in question, then, would technically count as an accessory, a lowering of the price of the goods will simply not be a possibility -- and our sorrowful regret of these circumstances, on your behalf, fills us with utmost terrifying dread." I wanted to rail against the machine, and type free words; I wanted to tell this man that, someday, perhaps, I would tire of these eyeglasses the way he had (in less than two months, even) and I would then want to pass them along to the next desirer. To deny me the right to strongly say that something I don't precisely need is not of value to me is to accuse me of being a beast, an unworthy successor to the title of "object of history". I wondered for an instant what Nietzsche would have to say about this, and all at once felt ridiculed by the very oxygen surrounding me: the only thing Nietzsche would have to say about all this is the sound of being dead.

The glasses would arrive two mornings after this, and I'd limp to the door with blisters on my feet from wearing sandals during my long, lost, strange walk through the neighborhood everyone had told me, with conviction (and two days late for April Fools), was just minutes from my home. I'd end up lost for two hours, laughed at by police officers (who asked me for my ID, among other things), and finally on a train that took too long to get me back home. Half the world on the walk to that train station was either quaint and half the height one would expect, and the other half was huge, and new. Everything was as though coated in lavender, cashmere-like glass. I didn't feel glad to be alive so much as I felt sad about not being glad to be not dead. Eventually, there was that Vegan restaurant, inside of which a woman dressed in hemp glared in contempt at me for wearing a sweater and a muffler obviously made of animal clippings. Under the unsettling calm of a Philip Glass composition, she told her two friends that she had a friend coming from America, a friend who spoke no Japanese at all, and who would need to dine exclusively on organic food absolutely untouched by anyone who so much as owns a pet.

I remembered, and briefly, the desire of this age, to always do things as differently as possible from what we've grown up seeing people enjoy. I realize that I never write about noise-rock, much as I like paying upwards of 8,000 yen monthly to stand in pitch-dark basements with fax-machine-sounds vibrating the surface of my skin. I don't talk about this hobby of mine, and Catholic priests don't give homilies about how much they enjoy masturbation. I'm not going to lie to you, though: there's most certainly not nothing in the spiked pit called noise-rock that I don't believe I can't take away and stand up on a shelf somewhere else. For now, though, I only recall two incidents, one being something I didn't witness, and one being something that I did. The one I didn't witness involved legendary noise band Hanatarash, fronted by Yamatsuka Eye, who would later found Boredoms; Eye was known for copious flailing, microphone-fellating, screaming, and object-banging, and after one fateful night in Kyoto of 1985, he was known for having hired a bulldozer to destroy a club in the middle of his act. Of course, the club -- whose name, "Super Loft", is now synonymous with the destructive performance -- had to be shut down, and of course Eye was arrested; thanks to people like Eye, dudes who smoke while drinking muddy black coffee are given heroes that never really need to exist outside words, or even so much inside human frames; individual moments of history can and will be our heroes; that's what noise tells us. The other incident, which I did witness, involved a noise act in Okubo of 2007; a group of boys dressed in fashionable clothes each stood on stage for a whole minute, in silence, before their senior representative stepped to the microphone, and said, with something resembling multi-faceted factual incorrectness, that "We are the world's first a cappella noise-rock band". Fifteen minutes later, he still wasn't joking. Each member of the group screamed varied instrument mimicry into their respective microphones, not a single one of them hearing the same song in their head. I suppose this is as good a way to get laid as any; I'd been boiled hard by years of fear that I'd stand on a stage with a guitar, trying to play some laid-back, skillful classical rock, and get laughed at by all the girls in the world, even though I only wanted to impress the dudes with chips on their shoulders, with great-great-great grandmothers who'd swallowed flies, born staring horses dead in the eye, ready to die. A friend, perhaps under some influence, had told me, "One of these days, you just have to get up there and like . . . fuckin' do it, man." So it goes with a cappella noise; the girls they want, the loves they seek to hire, if nothing else, count thoughts above weather, deeds over words. After the show, at the "merchandise" table, where the other acts were selling CDs or stickers or handing out flyers, this group in question had a wad of 1,000-yen bills, fanned-out neatly, with a price-tag scribbled on a nearby convenient-store receipt: "1,000-yen bills: 1,050 yen each". I suppose that just about says everything about everything, right there.

Years and months before, the Patron Saint of Sons of Bitches had begroaned the then-modern youth's preference for sex over politics; years and then many months later, and far across the ocean, I wondered what the difference was, really. I sat in a damp wooden box with a low ceiling, in the presence of a sexless woman who had once dropped a twenty-five-pound frozen "spiritual experience" into my shopping basket, when all I'd wanted was to take home a single bottle of mustard; on a TV in another room, yet still visible thanks to geometry, the movie "You've Got Mail" played out in monotony. Tom Hanks' character in that movie has a four-year-old aunt, and a five-year-old brother: "We are . . . an American family" he says, early on. The TV set seemed all the more alien for being small, for being staticky, for being in another room; I for once sat at the adults' table, listening to four stress-turgid souls grow loose with drunk, thinking that at last there really is no difference between sex and politics, once all the gimmicks of the minute are out of the way. A Spanish man lamented having no visa; two Japanese girls who dress hair for a living lamented being uninteresting; the spiritual presser lamented not being able to speak English. Eventually, an eastern European individual showed up, and began making cutely rude jokes about everyone's clothes. He pointed at the holes in my jeans, and said "Hey man, it's not, you know, the cold?" He then squealed in Japanese, touching my exposed kneeflesh: "Samuuuuuui!" "Cold!" What the fuck was that even supposed to mean? The girls erupted into laughter, simply because no one had been trying to say anything interesting, even unsuccessfully, until that point. The eastern European's English-speaking Japanese friend showed up, and they got drunk and talked loudly, at which point one of the girls said, and I quote, "It's like watching TV!" I started to wish for a minute that I was at home watching "You've Got Mail" alone, which is a really sad thing to think, though sometimes circumstances force desperate measures. Here I've been for the past six months, in a new house, and I've yet to spend a week's worth of nights in a row alone. Or with anyone else, really. And somewhere else, behind a curtain behind a curtain somewhere in the world, looking to the internet, to text and feelings, to find love has become normal to the point of tedium. Dating websites exist, these days, where girls you've met and had sex with on previous occasions can post testimonies on your profile rating your performance. There's nothing terrible, or even horrible, about this situation; it just feels, as it always has, sad to see things change. In other news, scientists have proven that light slows down as temperatures approach absolute zero, that it can be slowed to a point where it will stand still, like a sphere in the air; it is very cold in space: years ago people used to stare at the stars and wonder what they were; years after that, they would stare at the stars and wonder how far away they were; years later, they looked at the stars, maybe baked out of their mind on some Delicious Imported Weed, and quoted numbers regarding the facts of light and life, how the stars are so far away that it might take millions of years for their light to reach us, so maybe some of the stars we see at night don't exist anymore; now, however, what can we think, that the lights of stars we see in the sky represent those fortunate enough to shine through the cold. If we were truly long and wise enough to see everything that ever traveled through space, the night sky would be dead white, and fearsome. Born staring pack horses dead in the eyes, hunger unquenchable, the sky white as eternal death -- how can any human being born in the time of global warming not forgive any other for loving more than one something more than once in one day?

I wake up every morning, these days, a son of a different bitch than I was the night before. Much as I try to order my world, disorder creeps up at the laziest moments: I have a system with my iPod Shuffle, wherein I arrange the songs in my playlist in alphabetical order by artist; as I walk the world I listen to music in shuffle mode; if I hear a song by an artist I'd like to hear more of, I'd flip the iPod back into non-shuffle mode, and select another song, and then re-shuffle when I feel like it. On one day that might have been months ago or might have been yesterday, the iPod Shuffle gave me Neutral Milk Hotel's "The Aeroplane Over the Sea", then Zazen Boys' "The City Dreaming", then David Bowie's "Heroes", then The Birthday's "Alright", then David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" A day after this -- and this might also have been the third day in a row wherein the Apple Weather Widget told me it was going to rain today and clear up tomorrow -- it played the same sequence, even after being un-shuffled and re-shuffled. I live thirteen minutes from bed to desk, with a train included; I live at the end of the line; my chariot always sits hovering. I have no need to wander or to roam, anymore; I have a single idea; my technology trusted to be random produces the same precise string of songs six or seven times in a row, and subtly I begin to trust the world to no longer obey its purposes. On a night of perhaps-imaginary celestial events, as cashmere cannonballs enter the earth's atmosphere and survive, each of them a smoldering miracle, there's me beneath a soupy sky, maybe in love, or maybe just not dead; I am and will always be a murder mystery in which no one dies; halfway through the walk home I look down to tie my shoe; my cellular phone buzzes, I flip it open before standing up, and it's an automated mail from Domino's Pizza, telling me that pizza is cheaper on rainy nights; it's then that I realize I'm carrying an umbrella, and shortly after that I end up wondering if, tonight, the shotgun holed up next door shall once again attempt a dramatic reading of the phone book in the softest voice he can manage. When I look up, phenomenally, I find that I am lost, and so are you.

brendanlee: A Gamer Spots Game.

brendanlee — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:21:40 -0800

I am not, by natural preference, a Politics Junkie.

My good father is an addict, though, of a very different color. I used to watch him go google-eyed (this was before Google's failed challenge of the Microsoft eyeball patent) between CNN and MSNBC and (later) Fox News, shouting at regular intervals at a prime-time pastiche of puffy politicos and pontificating pundits. Again and again, Whitewater or Iraq or Osama or Lewinsky or The Giant Wall To Eliminate Mexico, his mustachioed point was pretty much always the same thing:

This thing that was happening! He could not BELIEVE this! This thing!

The things the man is unable to believe are, I think, a great source of fun and energy for him. As the kid, though, I found it all kinds of depressing. I mean, it was basically the same Talk Stew 24/7 . . . the context kind of changed, I guess, but for me it was all just a re-type of a nearly identical format. That whole Journalism thing - - I couldn't really see why anyone would need to actually take out student loans for that sort of thing. You just needed to read The Onion or The Lampoon or The Daily Omniscient Laughtacular or whatever, and have less of a sense of shame about spotting inconsistencies in the figures and events of the day. (That's called bias.)

So now I'm steering the ramshackle Life Express towards Thirtiesville (Population: Previously Unnecessary Zeal for Hair Removal/Preservation); apparently we are in the midst of some kind of election, here. And wouldn't you know it . . . I think the horrifying civics-minded parasite paddling around my father's spinal fluid has somehow, in some way, gotten to me.

Oh, I vote. I vote and I have voted, but in terms of actual gee-gosh civics rushes I'd have to say that helping send this one Baby Shaker to prison for life was a far cleaner and longer-lasting high. But now I'm starting to get breathless at the little things. WILL the Puerto Rican delegates become instrumental to selecting a candidate they can never elect? DOES futuristic space candidate Barack Obama have the momentum to carry a demographically-challenged Rhode Island? HAS McCain's face been subtly re-textured and stylized throughout the course of the campaign? I'm starting to believe that it has. I want to believe that it has.

You should not DO this for days at a time, as I foolishly have. I'm starting to think big and hazy and conspiratorial: just how did Hillary get that mysterious cough, anyway? Am I really supposed to believe that Bill Clinton was able to smooth his way through an impeachment and a record-breaking number of presidential pardons, and then - - OOPS, SORRY HONEY - - accidentally blow off his wife's leg (metaphorically) by disenfranchising a legion of committed black voters with a sudden case of late-onset foot-in-mouth? If Obama's soul-stirring podium-rattlers are just the Powerbook tappings of his 26-year-old speechwriter, could I maybe vote for him instead?

In an effort to try and regroup from a four-day political enema of Google News and happushu, I went to an International Party in the love hotel district of Shibuya last night, spur-of-the-moment. I needed to get my feet out from under my desk; I needed to connect. It was a party kind of party; full of the kinds of people that I rarely see or talk to anymore, and I got kind of wistful and tipsy and cocky and I caught a girl's eye, and we traded numbers and got to kissin' for a while.

"I have rare picture." She snapped open her cell phone.

It was a picture of her, maybe three years prior, naked, hugging the naked and furiously-tattooed back of a naked and furiously-tattooed man.

"My father. Very powerful mafia."

She sent me an e-mail a little while ago suggesting we "play" at my "house". But I think I'm going to go back to my other mistress for a while. I know where she liked to be rubbed, she's quiet, and she continually consolidates news from hundreds of sources every few minutes.

That, and I think she's less likely to get my smeary torso dumped into a shallow river.

Mr. Apol: natto: the tastening

Mr. Apol — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:17:22 -0800

I'm pretty sure it should go without saying, but, you never know so: don't eat natto. It's horrible and disgusting. This comes from someone who really likes korean tripe soup and sea urchin sushi.