Greenleaf; the fire market

The following is something I wrote a long time ago – 3.6.05, to be exact. I’m awake and I’ve finished the last of the cheap whiskey and it’s insomnia o’clock, and I find myself seriously nostalgic for Oxford for the first time since I left.

———-

Setting the house in order, or vacuuming.

For TS Eliot liberalism is a negative, a void of culture, since tradition is what defines culture.

Because he sees culture as an identity which arches over the individual. He means a set of laws and values, as he sees culture growing up around religion; what it sounds like is a love of place and atmosphere, an England which even I still sometimes see, and which I can see vapourising.
Fighting for liberalism, for internationalism which will reconcile values and laws with the luxury and the information which makes war abhorrent: this is what I believe will keep the world skating along alongside catastrophe scenaria.

If Einstein had only known he would have been a watchmaker; if Nietzche had only been a less contrary bastard he might have dressed a little worse and been a nutcase, and things would have been a lot simpler. But he being dead and unsilenced, we have to contend with the end of ideas and try to stay sentient, lest we pull the trees down trying to climb back up them.

But stopping the dialectic before it killed God would be asking a lot, all the way back to tranquilising Heraclitus, who tells us that all things can be traded for fire. While we vacuum, and spread culture thinner, the ideologies get fewer and war seems more and more like a Last Battle.

Peace comes with the end of history, we’re told, but now we know that ideology can only be cut down so far, only so many gods slain, until there is only an opposition left, a binary.

One of these two hemigods is born into everyone, or beaten in by the boot camp of childhood; as religion dies between generations these faiths are reborn in every child.

There are those who can live by the sword, and those who can’t. Those who have to buck against a home life, and those who have to starve before they kill.

We know what rough beast it is that can plant a bomb in a fountain, and stand on the pedestal watering it like a cupid and crowing as it fountains stone. Schools save some from it, but some they convert.

We know that messiahs are born in fire every generation, changelings, who will show us a different kind of truth in handfuls of spent flints, harrow hell and save us with flying nails inside their shock shell heads. There is murder and there is breeding, and between them is life, like wire.

But then, who knows what the future means?

“‘Then buy,” said the Fate arisen from Hell-
That thing of rags and patches-
“A box of matches!
For the machine that generated warmth
Beneath your breast is dead… You need a fire
To warm what lies upon your bone…
Not all the ashes of your brother Men
Will kindle that again-
Nor all the world’s incendiaries!
Who buys- Who buys-?
Come, give me pence to lay upon my staring lidless eyes!”

-The Canticle of the Rose, from ‘The Poems of the Atomic Bomb’, Edith Sitwell, 1925

Gunpowder watch

“It’s not a very happy future. In the book I mean.”

“There’s a lot of the future left. In the book I mean.”

Been away a while, I know. Partly due to inventing new slogans and other fallout from Twitter, the most passing of new obsessions.

Twitter: For the Man who has everything. Twitter: Tired of TankThink. Twitter: Beating that horse like it’s going out of style.

Also been away because I’m in the UK for a short break. It’s nice but unbalancing to be back- I’d forgotten, for instance, how much worse jet lag is when you go East to West. Hanging round my hometown was peaceful enough, though just like in India I’m finding everything wrought with a slightly sinister significance. After living in Japan, that is, where you feel yourself constantly, blandly observed but never make eye contact.

Went into London with my love, walked around the South Bank looking for an interview place for her, sat in the pub waiting, listening to the idle chat of the piecemeal regulars for any imagined aggression, reading HG Wells’ First and Last Things I found in a rarities place in Oxford. (I found Oxford not a spring of painful nostalgia, as I’d been told to expect, but the most happy place I can remember since Hong Kong).

We ended up under a huge glassed complex called Parliament View, looking across the river to Parliament and down the Bank to the fragile, spindly Eye. She wondered aloud about forgetting to close your curtains if you lived in Parliament View; what kind of a Representation you might inadvertantly make to our rulers. It’s telling that I thought about the opposite: thought about living there to permanently observe the crenellated seat of Government, having a video link permanently stood at your window to capture the moment someone blew up Parliament, like the Death Watch maintained by professional shifts of media men at all public appearances by the US President.

FInished Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow this morning, then finally played through Portal, a violence-free portrait in passive aggression, and then to offset it watched alternating episodes of Castle and Life, read Origins:Wolverine and then started Joe ‘s classic The Forever War with Rambo on silent on the big screen and She watching Sarah Connor Chronicles next to me. Been a pretty high body count, as far as my days go.

The Forever War is a Space Opera about Vietnam. Ridley Scott is making it a film. Relativistic effects mean that soldiers fighting a distant and increasingly pointless war come back to an Earth that’s decades into the future. One two-year tour, started in 1997 and so far on Earth it’s 2038, and resource war has reduced society to almost totally privatised subsistence and protection- Capital anarchy, basically, with a world currency of kilocalories the only constant government influence. The parodic levels of boredom and  arbitrary deaths of another tour of infantry space travel seems like a pretty good alternative.

“Decidedly, thought I, the devil has many uses; and if he did not exist we would have to invent him, to give people some way of explaining the inexplicable.” Jules Verne, The Master of the World

Wandered into the kitchen and thought about that shell-plastic vision of the future, and Parliament View and the hysterics and gloom over this coming Wednesday in London and what may come to be called the G20 riots. On Saturday evening on the return commuter train I sat opposite two jovial men who had realised their superiors had stubbornly scheduled a group meeting for 10AM in the Square Mile. They wondered aloud whether to wear collars or riot gear while I read this gleeful little number from Metro.

Biden has appealed to protestors to let governors do their work, but I’m not sure that’s going to dent any half-tire armour or anyone who thought Children of Men looked like a lot of fun. What I want to see is Al Gore stand on top a car and tell people he’s going to quote a great man: I know you’re angry. I’m angry.

Lost in Space was set in 1999, as was Quantum Leap. The Forever War was written in 1973, about a Ration War in 2007. And Star Wars seems a long time ago.

The amateur ghost

Beating that horse till it shines

Had an interview with a Catholic missionary who runs a homeless centre and a drug rehabilitation program. Been here 35 years, French/German who does a Mass in Spanish and English and Speaks and writes Japanese like a native. And genuinely, almost shyly generous.

And found some great graffiti tags on top of legitimate, shiny municipal street pitches in an underpass near Hakata-eki, in what’s probably the most “Japanese” (read: Blade Runner) area of the city.

Sound the ReTweet

The company I blogged about earlier appear to have taken me on for an internship. Woot! Now I need to start working on a blogroll and a daily reading regimen, among other things. Now that I am more or less addicted to Twitter I also need to establish a personal/professional barrier even in my own ‘personal’ space. Such is the nature of the self-promotional jungle we live in.

I had rather coquettishly/transparently already followed the guy who interviewed me on Twitter, before I heard. It’s a funny world. There’s a lot to be said about whether Twitter’s tipping or not, or whether I’ve hit it just as it jumps the shark, and there’s a couple of thought experiments I want to run. A few years ago I could have claimed I was going ‘undercover’ in the agency world, in order to assuage Bill Hicks’ ghost, but you can’t really go undercover in naked self-promotion without walling off a part of yourself, a la Mother Night. So I will dive into experimental crowdshouting.

Finally a bit of downtime, though a great weekend. Going to finish watching TNMT The Movie 1 and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

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I MAY be addicted to Muji notebooks, at least as a displacement. This doesn’t even include my Japanese workbooks. This was just what I had on my desk at the time. Not one is unused. Not one is finished.

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Finally today: gauche I know, but if reproducing Youtube comment chats for laughs is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. From the video to Love Lockdown.

xSbeex (1 hour ago) Show Hide

I can’t decide whats better, Love Lockdown or Heartless? :L

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xminii96x (1 hour ago) Show Hide

That is Hardly Appropriate!

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huweyboy678 (1 hour ago) Show Hide

wats up wid the creepy voodoo people?

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ADii2195 (2 hours ago) Show Hide

woow that’s great XD

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mk47Ndubz (2 hours ago) Show Hide

heartless iz way better

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mk47Ndubz (2 hours ago) Show Hide

suk ur mum

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coolcheese1234567 (3 hours ago) Show Hide

loovvveee ittt x x

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dervish2173 (3 hours ago) Show Hide

omg nice bass, niceee bass

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SPROCKM (3 hours ago) Show Hide

cLeary influenced by “J DILLA ” (RIP 2/10/06) singing/drumz/synths.its coo im influenced of this also(listen to the PAY JAY album was proably done in 2005″

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Omniverse77 (3 hours ago) Show Hide

i know what you may be naturally good at: giving head.

more?

There’s a crack in everything

To Nagasaki over the weekend, for the Chinatown Lantern Festival. I remembered my tripod, and had looked at some night photography tutorials, so my ratio of shots taken to acceptable images has increased, though not by much. Really what I need to do is limit myself to no more than two shots per subject, to learn myself out of ‘fire-and-forget’ digital-style photography.

The Nagasaki museum of Culture and History is pretty good, nice guides, and a play by remarkably enthusiastic wigged actors about a guy who posed as a Christian to get free passage back home to Nagasaki under arrest, and who was exiled for his cheek.

yeah

Authentic reproduction Meiji-era urinal.

It was kind of weird to be in Nagasaki for the first time and not do anything related to the bomb. The people I was with had been to the memorial and museum on their first trip, and I was happy to trail round Chinatown and eat nice familiar Chao huan and stuff  while our Taiwanese friends choked at the prices. It’s a nice town, surprisingly small, enough that the dinky streetcars can serve it as well as a metro could.

Nat. The bridges reminded me of Prague, the stepping-stone crossings of Gorahi.

Among other things, we came across a manga-ka doing portraits, who for a thousand yen discovered and brought out my inner wistful, bearded fifteen-year-old sad girl in snow.  Pictures to follow.

We finally did calligraphy classes, which I found relaxing and extremely satisfying. I need to lay out my first efforts for a photo, but we also did a bit on waka, Japanese fixed-syllable poetry, and I finally found the bit of paper that I worked one out on. It’s such a simple sentiment that I can’t believe it hasn’t been expressed before, especially in such a consciously finite format; nonetheless, we’re told not to fall into the trap of mistaking simplicity for crudeness in waka.

転ぶ のは

簡単ですが立つ

は難しい

korobu no wa

kantan desu ga, tatsu

wa muzukashii

Falling over is

easy, but standing up is

more difficult.

easy living

killed the young dudes

in the high boots

Image post up at Which is more distant.  You have no idea how long it took to get that six tile layout to work in WordPress, and I’m still not confident it will display right in all the most popular rezzes.

Calligraphy this morning, then making paper mache in art in the afternoon, so I got covered in black and white.  Calligraphy was great, extremely relaxing, and something that I could see myself getting really into. Perversely so, given how horrible my handwriting is.

I really love the ichi go ichi e doctrine anyway, but in the past for me it’s always been in connection with performing on stage. When applied to calligraphy it’s about doing a one-off performance that leaves behind a visible, permanent record of all of its minute touches, wavers and flourishes. It’s intense yet personal, and so it’s like my sudoku.

Art lesson at school was only the second time in my life that I’ve made a witches’ cauldron out of paper mache for a play. The first was for a production of Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, where the base was a vast weight of crumpled-up glamour magazines taped to a plastic ash bin.

Today’s cauldron, for the school’s (mystifying) production of Macbeth, was a more squat, boxy affair, really more of an alembic: made of chicken wire wired to a cardboard box, it’s designed for Primary School height.

I’ll post an image of my calligraphy process later on.

(excellent account of the ‘Living with Alzheimer’s: Terry Pratchett’ two-parter on Mediaguardian, by the way. As someone with a family history, it’s riveting stuff.

(Also, various people are appealing for Jeremy Clarkson to be taken off the air. I don’t particularly mind what he did: Oh, he insulted the Prime Minister? Oh well…

(But entitlement comes in many forms, and Clarkson’s sense of entitlement has always irritated me during his recent renaissance: the sense of cultural embodiment that he’s bought into, of vox populi, and the right to indefinitely stretch the boundaries of what he can say. It was only going to be defensible for so long, before he started to look like a fool.

(The opportunity is there for the BBC to appear to take a firm hand, and thus appear to assuage various other bothering stories about it being hostage to its big properties.

(Not that it will. It will refuse to be bullied, to the point of standing beside its most oddest of friends; which is very admirable in a way which can’t effectively be expressed by the press.)

saba saba

Spondee

Well, the very early morning drive I was supposed to have yesterday was cancelled because of copious snow, So I got to be woken at half six with a phone call telling me I didn’t have to be awake. By the time I woke up the snow had pretty much gone, so I stayed in all day in my Goan PJs working on the Iland script. I should really have plotted more and meticulously worked out fixed scenes a bit less, especially since as a collaboration I’m going to have to let go of a lot of my painstaking direction, and rightly so.

Today was the first day of our new cycle of lectures, which are so relaxed compared to last term’s schedule that they almost seems to be standing still. I know this is my opportunity to get a lot of Japanese studying done in my own time and according to my own interests, which is the chance I’ve been waiting for, but to do so I’m going to need

a) better time management and b) to not spend all the time that I feel useful or productive working on the script, which will be hard.

We are doing a long term research project with a presentation in Japanese at the end, and I’m going to do Nihon no Eiga (Japanese Cinema), which is going to be awesome. Kaiju movies and the barely-concealed spectre of the Bomb, anyone? I don’t actually know what the Japanese for the atom bomb is: I picked up Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain in a tiny second-hand bookshop in Bangalore, so I guess I can read that and call it ‘research’, along with Barefoot Gen.

Right now I’m reading Italo Calvino’s The Literature Machine, which has yielded some interesting epigraphs for the script already:

And so the author vanishes -that spolied child of ignorance- to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works. -Cybernetics and Ghosts, 1967

Sometimes I wonder how fortunate this kind of reading is: I was reading Aristophanes’ Nephelae before I even heard the pitch for the book (hard to believe that was ten days ago), and immediately there was a passage I wanted to use. I wonder if, unlike the pure story-building logic of Calvino’s hypothetical author-matics, I just grab at everything that catches my eye and warp the story to follow it, or if I shoehorn everything within reach into the story regardless of meaning, and make it unreadably patchwork. My first play was about the Crimea because I had been drinking and there had been Wikipedia, and the main character was obsessed with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine because I had been reading it for my course.

Maybe it’s because my reading is pretty unsystematic that I rely on serendipity too much: even here my bookshelf is helplessly scattergun, and i don’t really find time for it. I also rely on an instinct for syncretisme, in the sense used by Diderot when he tried to redefine the Biblical sin as a kind of eclecticism and fusion in L’Encyclopedie. In any case, I often find that I’ll experiment with an idea or detail to solve a narrative problem, work on it for a while, then find I’ve become adamant on that solution even when others are clearly better.

Not doctored, but tidied up some I'll admit

In any case. I got the draft with notes back from Nick this evening, and realised going through it that at some stage yesterday Id started saving it ina  different place, and had sent him the wrong doc at the end of the day. He was still excited, bless him, but I was really pissed off at myself when I realised that the whole day’s work had been a few tinkering changes to one scene, none of the amendments we’d talked about on Saturday night and and none of the big rewrites I’d been talking up. Yesterday had enough long stretches of unproductivity without my failling to save the better half of the days’ work.

Fortunately I hadn’t lost the doc, just saved somewhere else, but it took a long time to cross-reference the changes across all three docs and make a current one. Shame, because I was hoping to finally start plotting new stuff rather than just staying comfortably tinkering with scenes I’ve already worked out. There’s still time I suppose, but if I don’t do some Japanese this evening I’ll go mad. Rote learning will be almost relaxing for a while.

[a very little while]

we as a people decide if Shady’s as bad as he says he is

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Update: another Tom McHenry comic, about two cartoonists in a cell at the end of the world about to fight in an alien gladiatorial arena. I feel like this sometimes.

I’ve been reading a lot of journal comics lately, a medium I used to hate, and it’s intermittently comforting and depressing that hourlies and journals are mostly about procrastination and missed opportunities. See especiallyKate Beaton’s gut-wrenchingly great Conversations With A Younger Self

‘Hell begins the day that God grants you the vision to see all that you could have done, should have done, and would have done, but did not do.’ — Goethe

2nd Update: Of course, Calvino invites us to inspect his deeper motives for believing in the comforting automation of literature,and our own motives for rejecting it. I suppose when I’m arguing for a serendipitous or epiphenomenal alignment of chance bookshop purchases and mental chemistry in the writing process, I’m trying to preserve the Romantic idea of the ineffable element in the Writer’s work. But the ineffable is scary, not to mention boring.

Month of Sundays

Yesterday: a day off lectures, but I still had to call in sick from one job to meet my commitments for the other job, and then go into school to do an hour of supervising unstable ankle-biters. Then to TJ for a cultural evening at a club that we’d done some promo for, including a display by a gaijin swordsmaster and re-meeting the hulking Australian rugby players that I interviewed for my fiery first magazine gig.

Today: up to TJ to meet K and be introduced to K’s Thai filmmaker friend, who had originally cast K in a small part but who apparently changed his mind when he found out K had a 20something blond gaijin actor friend. SO I may or may not have signed up to a lead role in a short film, being filmed over the next few months on the weekends. We’re driving out of the city to have a look at locations tomorrow, so I need to be up at 6.30. K has never acted and I’m supposedly in charge of coaching him to act the part of a stern, scared father, rather than his usual flamboyance. Which is going to be perversely entertaining.

Then to Nik’s house for amazing Feta and Spinach pie and working on Iland ideas, finishing each other’s sentences, he clucking over his early sketches and me grumbling over my first script draft. Still excited, still making myself busier. Then I creaked home through the snow.

How cold is it right now, in five words? It. will. fracture. your. kneecaps.

Bed now, to read the Scott McCloud book Nik lent me and think about visual pacing.

Palaces, persimmons

“Well, it’s only a proportionally small section of the internet, dear.”

It’s worth noting that this blog is now doing slightly better on the eyeballs front that my ‘flagship’ one at Which is more Distant. Now, there are many reasons why this many be so: perhaps it reflects a preference of the average Joe Internet-reader for photos over mountainous text and questionable image choices. Perhaps writing about myself here at least saves me from the accusation that I’m just repeating what’s been better said elsewhere. Or perhaps a clue can be found in the Top Search returns for the blog as it stands since I added the last post:

japan ninjasex,  japanese ninja sex,  tachimasu,  nanka japanese,  itte imasu

I have got to start going off-topic more on Which is more distant.

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Hong Kong and India Dec 08 – Jan 09

Flying to India to visit my girlfriend I had an eight-hour stopover in Hong Kong (and a bloody hour-long codeshare stopover in Taipei which my air tickets studiously failed to mention). I got to go into the city by bus, in glorious weather, recreating exactly our minibus drive into the city the day I arrived four and a half years ago. I can’t express how much I love the city, how happy it made me to see it’s weird, part-lunar, part-tropical landscape, its forested uncivil hills towering over the towers, hear people answer the phone with the local “Waii?”, hear them speaking six differnet languages and all swearing in English.

I was unspeakably lucky that I got to go there after leaving home: I still don’t feel as much at home anywhere, not even beloved Oxford. I walked down to TST from Jordan- didn’t have the time for Mong Kok, my old neighbourhood and formerly the most denself populated place on earth- took an old favourite, the Star Ferry, saw the devastation of the new waterfront developments in Central, walked up to Lan Kwai Fong past the Foreign Correspondants’ Club (which I once tried to gatecrash and of which I will one day be a member), made it to the Whiskey Priest for Happy Hour, read the papers, dined on Shashlik at Balalaika, walked back down to IFC 1 (from the Skyhook Scene in The Dark Knight) and onto the Airport express. Lonesome bliss.

The Star Ferry

People who know the city will understand my shock at the destruction of the plaza in front of the Central Ferry terminal, right down into the old underpasses.

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How I love India. Where else in the world would there be in a market for pirated books on street stalls? Jewtown, Cochin, Kerala.

you heard

Part of the oldest Synagogue in India, which nowadays serves about 60 Jewish folks. They had their first wedding in like 20 years a week after we were there.

Also please note that while we were there the style of news coverage still overclocked after the Mumbai attacks ranged from the reasoned and pragmatic to completely batshit ball-eating crazy about impending war with Pakistan. That latter mode was the one favoured by Star News, the News Corp. arm in India.

Cochin

A stunning Indian girl in a kimono, beautifully tied by me. That’s what I call fusion.

There are more and better taken ones of these,  but they’re just for me. We were to discover in Goa that generally speaking White girls can get away with much more independence and  general skimpiness than can the “locals”.

This is in Thekkady, though.

Chinese fishing nets, waterfront, Cochin

Kathakali performers, Kumarakoram, Kerala

A notorious abandoned Moscow-registered Tanker that’s been long-gutted and left off Calangute Beach in Goa for years now because no-one wants to take responsibility for it. Stay tuned for a re-imagining of the ship as the heart of a paramilitary anti-globalisation movement. They stare out day and night over the excess and sloth of basting  holidaymakers and plot the downfall of the enableocracy.

Shouted from my balcony:

WOOOO! Obama!

Hai, Kikimasu ne?!