yakushima pictures

take a fucking look

onsen ikou

yesterday had a dream about going to a trade fair with some russians -- i forget what i had to trade with, but i traded with a soviet for, what i thought were, some shards of sputnik; but through the alchemy of dreams it changed into some sort of flame proof blanket. i unraveled the blanket thinking that there might be diamonds inside, but found none.

the morning i walked into the mountains with a litre of water and one perfectly ripe banana; found a nice swimming spot by the miyanoura river (miyanoura is the town i am in), hung out in the cool, limpid water for a bit. for the most part the rivers here, especially closer to the mountains, is totally fine to drink; although, i swear it tastes a bit of algae. hiked for about 3 hours, got a bit into the mountain trails which lead to the old growth forests and mountain summits. the weathers perfect right now, warm and sunny, blustery and cool.

went in on the trail for about 30-40 mins before hunger impelled me to turn back. got home a lot more exhausted than i thought i was (maybe i had some sun stroke?), ate bunch and passed out watching the old samurai shows they always play in the early afternoons.

later on went swimming with ashley in the river; the water is still pretty head numbingly cold in some parts. the water is so clear you can see all the fish swimming about. old guys in a nearby guest house building kept sticking their heads out to shout random stuff at us. ashley was wearing her wet suit and i think they were amused by that -- or they might have been simply amused by a white person in a river.

after dinner we went out to the hira uchi kai chu onsen in the south of the island. probably the most "natural" onsen ive been to, no buildings, onsen is just a few pools where rocks have been kind of cemented together where sulfurous geothermic water seeps. the onsen is submerged under the sea except for a few hours around the low tide when the ocean recesses to reveal the pools. we got there just a a bit after the ocean went down so the pool was still luke warm in some parts. the scene was intense, the ocean crashing against rocks nearby lit by a bright gibbous moon. once in a while i would stand on a rock, naked with arms akimbo, surveying the infinite ocean, the pin pricks of stars, the almost orbicular moon and its silverly reflection in the ocean.

i've been to a few onsens in my life, but this was probably the best.

japan pictures

Vision Lost&Found

The words and inspiration are Kundera’s, I have only read them, and then imagined them, frist literally, later grotesquely. The words were read somewhere on the Amherst campus; I remember the heat of early August, the shade of the trees, a mediocre burrito.

The imagery developed 5 years ago, during my visits to the banks of the kamo river, sunny days with a bottle of tea -- green or oolong, possibly rooibos – and a crushed half pack of lucky strikes (“its toasted” as Yamato would say).

The picture is of a boat, the galleon of the body and the crew of the soul, alighted upon the deck as the boat departs for some giddy destination. The crew is waving widely at the people on shore, exquisitely aware that this may be the last time. On shore I imagine handkerchiefs, white, checked, waving in the sea breeze, delicate gloved hands gripping onto parasols (laced) threatening to blow off into the bay. Some of the men are so moved their rip their broadcloths off their burly chests and twirl them madly above their heads, the angular velocity a manifestation of their passions. Some, wide eyed, are shouting so hard they have permanently damaged the strings of the larynx. Others are weeping so extravagantly, puddles exist at their feet, the snot is flowing out of every orifice, burly hands collect the watery mucous, rubbing it on the fabric of their shirts and pants. These sad, moist, men stand together, creating a small creek of emotional effluviae, some are even pissing their pants. The captain, at first, tries to discipline his pathologic crew, but soon gives up himself to the same exaggerated expressions when he discovers that his first officer is howling like a werewolf, hopping up and down on the deck, pounding the rails of the galleon until the sides of his hands are bloodied and studded with slivers of shattered oak … I could go on.

Today waking up form a short nap by the kamo, having gone out with a 280 yen bento box from the nearby am/pm, I remember the orignal words again:

“…her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation”

kyoto

walking around kyoto, i got assaulted with olfactory nostalgia -- nothing gets you in the throat quite like the smell of something familiar. i think before i would try to explain how much i liked kyoto in terms of objective facts; the parks, the mountains and nature, the shrines and temples, the small restaurants, etc. but now i think none of these things are really important.

there are times when you see a page of a magazine or brochure, and from that one image your mind imagines an entire limpid and perfect world. kyoto is that world for me, come to life. you can walk through it, it smells great, the imperial palace looks great, the people are nice, the old hunchback fruit seller is still there plying his trade.

uh, yep

met up with old kyoto friends in shibuya. maybe its because we are all asian, but, fuck, no one looks any different than 5 years ago. of course, now people are married, or about to be married, etc; in japan, perhaps just a bit more than in america, the course of life is unescapable.

after a few izakayas (japanese bars), we were all reasonably drunk. a few of the guys decided to take me to a hostess bar. a hostess bar, which is quite common in japan and probably other east asian countries, exists at the softest corner of the paying for female affection/attention spectrum. its a bar with an expensive cover charge where elaborately made up, and generally good looking (relative to the general bell curve) women -- the hostess -- comes to talk to you, pours your drinks, lights your cigarettes, and laughs at your jokes. you pay a certain amount per hour (time service as they call it). during that time they try to rotate in a few different girls.

on one hand, this is just a commercialization and formalization of the courtship grammar which occurs throughout the world: guys signaling to women their wealth by liberally spending money; specifically, the modern extension of the japanese "floating dream world" ; ie, the geisha/courtisan tradition.

but on the other hand, hostess bars make no sense to me whatsoever. the illusion is so easy to see through that, even drunk, its hard to convince myself of it. i tried to reframe the situation as japanese language and cultural study; here was a chance to ask some seriously impudent & direct questions. for each girl i had a set list of questions:

(1) what is your name
(2) where are you from
(3) how old are you
(4) how long have you worked here? do you like it here?
(5) what are your hobbies?
(6) what are your aspirations in life? tell me everything.

not sure right now how many girls i talked to (4-5?), but my favorite was mana-san, from the kansai area, age 23 ( i think). she had just broken up with her boyfriend 2 days ago, but didn't dwell on it. she was merely working to save up money to live a relaxing life taking care of stray dogs (she took some pains to explain that she was uninterested in dogs from the store). i told her i was more into cats, and she said that cats are to independent and really didn't need her saving. i found her sincere and was kind of bummed when she switched out for another girl.

i was pretty happy when our time was up. i feel bad for the last girl, i was pretty drunk (something about the place made me hit the early times bourbon real hard), my japanese abilities were fading fast, and i was really tired of explaining why i was in japan for the 4/5th time. i think i asked her where she was from 3 times in a row and never got past that.

ok, but i don't want to sound like i had a bad time; i was really happy to be able chill with my friends again. in japan, everyone is merely polite unless you are "nakama" (lit. "in group"). to me the japanese experience is, while pleasant, distant and cold except with my friends. i love these guys. i was really touched that my friends basically shelled out a ton of money to give my the shibuya hostess bar experience. and also there was one really, really hot raven haired girl with a tattoo of a cat sitting on a scimitar moon. god, what was her name?

oof, anyway, the hangover is beginning and this jet lag is turning out to be a little harder to get over than I thought; must be getting old. lord, i just need one night where i don't wake up insanely early. in a couple of hours i will get really hungry and go to the sukiya to eat a breakfast of rice, miso soup, raw egg, grilled salmon, picked vegetables and natto. but first, a shower.

off to kyoto in a few hours.

tokyo hai hai

one last night of moderate boozing at the loft and off i went to JFK at 5:30 am. Transfer at Seattle (unimpressed by coffee), a quick 10 hr jaunt, and here am i in tokyo. any novelty, simulacrum of novelty, nostalgia of novelty is pretty much all gone now for me and japan; its more like coming back to the 2nd home; place smells the same, everything just as it was before. smell and nostalgia must be the same billion or so neurons.

experienced a bit of rush hour commuting on the trains: just horrible. however, only 2 stops from shinagawa to gotanda. the door opened on my side, luckily, and i spewed forth.

at certain packing densities, all politeness, including japanese politeness, erodes; this moment is infinite, the 4/5/6 going uptown at 6, a bus in shanghai, a train in dehli. humanity collapses into wave/particle duality.

despite waking up at 5:45 am today, i feel like i barely have any jetlag. went to a few izakayas for a pint with liver/fish parts, came back to watch late night japanese tv where the audience guesses at bra cup sizes.


sunrise in brooklyn


sunset in tokyo

the wood worker

a very short thing i did for aaron's workshop. i guess its a promo, but, uh, with a dark ambient sound track.

first clip

so here is the first clip / short that i did a long while ago; perhaps february? i had the camera for maybe a few weeks and david and i were thinking that we needed a very small project to first cut our teeth on. carina was nice enough to invite us to a night of bowling so i wrote up like a short 1 page 'screenplay'. the original plan was for it to be a faux documentary absurdist/black humor piece with interviews clips that compared bowling, specifically, mindless destruction of pins, to genocide ... the actual result (after culling through a morass of bad footage and some basic editing) was more like a really dark (in many ways), elegiac intro to a ... i don't even know what:



several now obvious (but at the time i think, caught up in the enthusiasm, i decided to just plunge in there w/o much consideration) lessons were learned that night; lessons that encompass basically every fundmental facet of capturing video

(1) the bowling / bar was way too dark. the lens we used (the kit lens that came with the gh1) wasn't a very "fast" lens either (a fast lens will allow more light into the sensor, so it doesn't require as much lighting in the environment, ie, good for dim situations). the result was that every shot was extremely dark. although, in a moment of some ingenuity, we took the lamp shade off one of some random lamp to use as lighting.

(2) the place was fucking noisy, and all i had for sound was my zoom h2 sound recorder. the h2 is great for capturing environment sound, but that was exactly what i didn't want. instead of catching the voice of the person being interviewed, it recorded the sound of the entire bar. in hindsight, a good shotgun mic would have been better, although, really in a place that loud, you just record the ambient sound and then overdub the lines later.

(3) hand holding the camera provides for some headache inducing shaky shots. professionals usually have the camera shoulder mounted or even strapped to a steady cam full body suit to dampen the small vibrations. i promptly bought a stout tripod, and though i still get tempted by the ease of handholding sometimes, i find that i just regret it afterwards.

doing the editing was also pretty edifying --

(1) if you go into a shoot with no real plan and no control over it, then, be prepared to throw away 95% of your footage, because the chances of the random footage magically cohering into narrative of any kind is small.

(2) holy shit, music makes all the difference. without the soundtrack its just some shots of driving around and dark stuff! now at least the shots make sense in terms of a atmosphere setting context.

couple of things make this clip compelling for me; the shot of my friend twirling a pen that gets faded in the beginning, and the shots of the hockey game.

selections from old travel journals

two edited down entries i wrote on the osaka-shanghai ferry during the fall of 2004. this is the very beginning of the mongolia trip. after shanghai, i would go on to beijing, and, from there, catch the train to ulan bator.

8.14.2004
(on the osaka->shanghai ferry)

the 2nd day from osaka to shanghai is always the toughest; the ferry heads out of the japanese coast into open seas. even with perfect weather, as we are having today, there are inevitably people barfing all over the place. i woke up to the sound of a cantonese woman dispensing her stomach acids into one of the plastic bags the crew has been nice enough to place everywhere.

...

so far i've spend most of time catching up on sleep, meditating, and soaking in the bath. i'll go out again tonight and soak in the desk as i did last night.

something gut-wrenchingly beautiful about dusk; it literally takes the heartstrings and uses them to garrote wire the innards into knots of vague allusions to ephemeral flowers.

...

i've been thinking about what i should do. i am reaching that point when reality and the present is catching up to that imaginary line that demarcates planned time and an amorphous future too wide to fit inside my narrow cranium. everyone has this problem, will have this problem for the rest of their lives. i am not fretting, since i know that it simply wouldn't do every time this line comes near; however, i am not overjoyed either.

8.15.2004
(arriving in shanghai)

woke up this morning to the sound of young stewardesses polishing the windows that look out, presently, at the yellow bay where the river disgorges its silty contents into the sea. everywhere you look it's steel, cranes, boats, huge containers. there is the same sort of glum industrial cloud that hangs over shanghai as there was in the spring. its hot as fuck outside this time though.

...

my skin is all dry from the two long baths i took yesterday

moving

the day of the move i had one of those hangovers that crescendos and peaks at around mid afternoon. woke up in the morning feeling not too bad considering, took a shower and felt even better. but when my dad came by around 11 am and we started to load the car and i realised that it might be not be turning up all roses.

the end of packing is always a rout; a full on retreat - whereas in the early stages things were collected, categorized, put into boxes, well marked, well stacked for maximum density - the last legs involve throwing random shit into trash bags. perhaps the hangover helped though. these final moments cause me some stress, but i think my mind might have been blurred just enough to not care.

the apex of nausea probably occurred on the ride home. at some point i had to just close my eyes. "how much did you drink?" my dad asked, "i dunno, a bunch" i said.

so far i am really enjoying being home. the main news here is that the bamboo is sprouting (or shooting) at a rapid pace, you almost feel like you can watch them grow. feels like they almost grow about a foot per day sometimes. my mom goes out everyday and harvests them, puts them in soups and stir fries. theres nothing i like more, really. "this is really organic" she says.

in my room awaited an entire host of beetles, not sure what kind. the sort you usually see in the woods though. at night all was quiet except for the sound of them, buzzing about, crashing into the lamp over and over. no one ever learns. i got fed up with that and got out the dyson. my parents have nice things, the dyson is really a superb vacuum; its everything as advertised, clean, powerful, and most importantly, it doesn't kick out any dust/smell. i wonder if the beetles died instantly or if they are simply starving to death in the belly of a machine which surpasses their comprehension.

as promised, my parents are giving me 2 rooms upstairs. the bed room has a nice tatami mat area. there is a sitting room with a flat screen tv and a view of the backyard woods area. my bathroom has a steam shower with a nice little polished granite ledge incase its gets all to tiring; its a little too much really. every bathroom is appointed with moisturizing soaps w/ loofahs, when all i every want is a bar of your most caustic soap.