autumn tactics

…originally recorded July 17th…

There is no bus

I don’t consider myself a sucker, though I am known to have my trusting and innocent nature taken advantage of from time to time. I’d read over and over in my Lonely Planet book about which bus route to take to get into the city, and seeing as how the bus was only about $1.10, I was determined to get the right one as quickly as possible. However, no sooner had I gone through the doors into the arrival lobby that I was accosted by a small, furtive looking woman insisting I take a taxi. I said no thank you, and that I was taking the bus. I figured that this would be the end of it, firm in my resolve for the cheaper public transportation. However, the woman moved more directly in my path and informed me with a deadpan face that there was no bus. My mind started backpedaling, I hadn’t expected this at all… no bus?! I mean, yes the airport was dark and it was half-past seven but… More out of unease and confusion than resolution, I continued to say no thank you and walked quickly away for a good three hundred feet until my would be driver gave up pursuit. Of course, as soon as I stopped a moment to check the airport signs about bus terminal some other fellow came up and tried asking me for a taxi again. I shook him off and hurried outside to the bus depot. At this point I figured I was safe, but aha, foolish me. While I was reading the signs confirming which bus I was to take, another man (perhaps in the same ring of taxi hustlers) came up and stood next to me, staring at the same sign, his chin in one hand, as if thinking the same things I was.

“Where are you going?”
“To the Shanghai center, the city center.”
“Mmm, yes, there is no bus that goes there.”
“But, I think there is. The sign over there says…”
“No, there are no buses. Let me get you a taxi.”

I just gave up talking to him and asked the bus station attendant (who was watching the whole thing with incredible boredom) if I could buy a ticket. He pointed at the bus and said “on bus, on bus”. So I scurried away and boarded the mass transport, leaving my third taxi driver at the curb.

It’s taking me a substantial amount of time to get through all of my audio clips from the Shanghai trip. There’s no sense in me typing them up now, it would just take too long. So I’m just going to pick out the highest quality ones and put them up here. You can download them one at a time, or in .zip bundles. They’re not so big since they’re only 32Kbps/16Khz. Anyway, enjoy my dopey voice.

07/17/04: ~7:30 pm - Just landed
07/17/04: ~8:30 pm - A progressive bistro
07/17/04: ~9:00 pm - The smell of half-developed countries
07/18/04: ~1:50 am - On the brink of vagrancy

…originally recorded July 17th…

Flying into the sun

I feel slightly like the poor Metionid, Icarus, and I’m starting to have a premonition that this entire trip is going to focus on frenetic pace and more people than are initially conceivable for such a small area. What happened to Li Mu Bai and the Green Destiny? Surely Master Te has a palatial, tranquil guest house waiting for me on the way to Wu Tan. While I’m on the subject, I suppose I should make my requisite list of disgustingly ignorant expectations before I land.

Chun-Li, of course (schwing!) *
really stern military officials and guardsmen *
live ducks, chickens, and other strange creatures flapping for their lives before being sold “truly fresh” *
everyone with long, braided pony tails and black robes *
every fibre of my intellectual property stolen copied ten million times, thirty seconds after landing *
to appear in an auto endorsement ad by the end of the weekend *

Forty minutes into Take Off 007 I’m starting to feel my Reeb having its way with me, I must make a trip to freshen up.

…originally recorded July 17th…

Donald Duck orange juice

I have an unofficial metric for rating the conscientiousness of airlines by the beverage snacks they serve. Easter China Airlines has become the new archetype for insensitivity towards those with lethal allergies to certain legumes. The entire plane’s economy section is served by about five TV screens roughly the size of a GameBoy Advance. Not that I’m interested in seeing clearly anyway, it seems most of them have large striated swatches of dead black space making for an interesting artistic statement. I’m not sure if the beer is named Reeb, or they just chose to write the letters right to left. The manufacturer’s crest bears a stylized ‘R’, so I guess Reeb it is.

Yes there’s nothing at all like a dixie cup of lukewarm Reeb to welcome you home to the People’s country. Note the clear marking that this beverage contains/was prepared with a full ten degrees P of something. Pasteurization? Preprocessing? Politburo? Whatever it is, I’m sure the competing labels only have eight or nine.

I’ve heard “How much is it?” so many times in the last two days I’m ready to claw my ears off, this may be a sign that my ‘learning by insane repetition’ method may have detrimental psychological side effects. A lot can be said for how softly one intones the syllables of a language. I wonder if I got Sarah McLachlan or Karen Carpenter to coo “that’s too expensive” it would be less painful.

I think that I’ve travelled internationally so much in the last twenty-four months that I’ve adapted completely and can handle it without stress or worry. That or I am on the very cusp of wanton mania. It’s a toss up.

I almost wanted to use the word ‘mayhem’ but I think that suggests a little more organization and a definitive goal. I remember the archvillain in M.A.S.K. was a mustached portly fellow known as Max Mayhem. Now there’s a name for you.

“I’ll get you Trakker!”

I can’t continue my discussion of afterschool 80s cartoons– the meal has just arrived. I was about to remove my humidifying mask to declare which entree I wanted but I quickly discovered I’m having beef. There is no choice. How very fittingly Communist. Elan would appreciate the irony of the situation. This reminds me of an old Wendy’s commercial featuring an Soviet fashion show where everyone is wearing drab colors and a rotund, hairy woman struts on stage wearing the same ochre Glad bag of a dress for each category (evening wear, casual wear, swim wear). It always cracks me up, I think it’s the only reason I play ‘Commericial Crazies‘ anymore. That, and John Moschitta.

ECA is not without its bounty. Despite a lack of breadth, I received not one but two separate mini-bottles of soy sauce, more than enough for administration of a near-lethal dosage. Additionally, judging by the number of times the beverage cart has stopped by I could easily have imbibed enough Reeb to get even a Tibetan musk ox inebriated. However, I chose to play it safe and stick to one as I’ll need my wits (and trilingual translation skills) about me.

Around the world in baseball

Baseball, regardless of which country you live in, has its good moments and its bad.

The good
Going to a Baystars-Giants game, getting the last available seats in right field, nearly catching three whoppers, your very own Kazuhiro Sasaki armband and Baystars thunder sticks. Mikiko and I went to see the infamous Yomiuri Giants for the first time Sunday. The only available seats were in smack in the center of Baystar territory. It didn’t really matter as I have emotional ties to half of the teams in the Central League, though I think the orange and red of my Waseda University shirt made me suspect. I made up for it with my never-more-than-five-feet-away-from-me Seahawks hat, and some well timed clapping. The game was pretty good; the home team came out strong, almost threw it all away, and won it on a walkoff two run homer in the eleventh. It almost wasn’t though, in a game that saw eleven homeruns and fourteen pitchers (but no Sasaki thanks to Scott Mullen’s arrogant insistence that he could finish the fourth after loading the bases and giving up a homer to the Giants’ Tuffy Rhodes). All in all, it was a good game. Exciting on-field antics, tasty, reasonably priced refreshments, and it didn’t run past my bedtime.

Hossiezo (left) is the street-smart one (obviously) of the Baystars four mascots.

The bad
On a day that should have been glorious, with a four-run lead and Ichiro taking three hits, the Mariners as usual imploded both ways at once. A 4-0 game became a 5-14 game, thanks to 14 walks by the Seattle bullpen (Oakland managed all of their runs on one less hit and a single homer). The Mariners’ entire season can be summed up with the last play in the top of the 7th: bases loaded, Ichiro on third, one out… and then the momentum comes to a whiplash-inducing halt as Raul Ibanez grounds right up the middle into a double play. The cook at the curry restaurant where I catch my weekly game shared my sentiments; in the past three weeks I’ve gone from knowing the entire roster backwards and forwards to barely being able to put together the outfield. Things are definitely changing, though so far it’s only been the jersey numbers attached to the suckiness.

“Who the hell are these guys, anyway?”

Back and breathing

To you:

I have returned from Mao’s great land. I did not buy a copy of the little red book. I took over ninety pictures. I recorded roughly seventy-five minutes of voice commentary during my time there. I have no idea how I should filter this media and pass it on to you. Please wait…

-Me

Into the great wide open (sort of)

I’ve been gearing up the past couple weeks for a trip to China. This Saturday I leave for Shanghai and will be wandering the sinking city with my orange Ferrino and five o’clock shadow over a long weekend for Umi no Hi (Ocean Day). Initially this trip (much like my excursion to Thailand) was supposed to be done in tandem, but as it seems to be my fate, I am again adventuring alone (much like Indiana Jones as I see it). If only I hadn’t left the Stetson and bullwhip in my room back home…

I’m kind of torn about how much to plan this. I bought a Lonely Planet guide in advance, so I have much more location-based information than I have use for. However, I think it’s really kind of against my nature to put restrictions or standards on off-time. So, I have a short list of things I want to see in particular, and the rest is just walking, walking, walking, with brief periods with an underdeveloped subway system. Saturday night I’m going to try my damnedest to get into the Rojam, a pretty famous disco home to one of Oakenfold’s best sets.

Other than that, I think it’s just Chinese people and rickety buildings I want to see. This trip will be the maiden voyage of my voice recorder, provided the authorities don’t seize it and myself for suspected espionage. I have over five hundred megs of compact flash to take with me for the PowerShot, but that’s still not enough really, since I ran out of space during The Great Journey just last month. My next big trip I hope to have a sweet little DV camcorder with me to satiate my burning desire to work on short, art films. But that’s going to take a couple months’ saving (sans binging both alcoholic and digital). Why am I doomed to I sink so much money into technology?

Anyway, all the money in the world won’t do me any good if I can’t get my tones right and master “I don’t want it.” [bu yao]

Wo shi bu hao da meiguoren!

Damn chainsaw is glued to the wall

Hurray for getting home at eight [though admittedly six would be far better]. Now I have time to tool around with Photoshop CS and listen to the Maniac Mansion soundtrack via the wonder of NSF files. MM is a quality game that recently received an indie VGA remake, Maniac Mansion is representative of the beautiful things LucasFilm/LucasArts could do before they became the world’s biggest destroyer of quality IP. If I could justify putting the time into it, I would probably make a blog dedicated just to reviewing games, with an emphasis on the period of 1985-1996. However, this is hard to do because a) no one would read it, and b) there are ten buh-fuggin’ million unemployed/high school kids already doing it. The only thing different I could bring is my style and sense of humor. Is it worth it? Come on…_my_ style?

I’ve been growing vegetables [with limited success] for the past couple of months. Fighting off the perils of excessive heat, scant sunshine and droves of microscopic, hungry vermin is not easy. As a result I have a set of mustard greens that looks like a weedy afterthought in a vacant lot. However, I am not one to be deterred by the appalling lack of skill with which I have brought something into the living world, so I am going to eat some of my scraggly offspring this evening. The peppermint, Myron, is still like a centimeter high– he’s a little slow. I figure though I’ll be able to season one cup of tea on Christmas morning so it’s worth the investment of constant love, sweet-talking and Barry White EPs.

Fished in

I am feeling quite satisfied having done something this evening other than just hammered on the J4. I’ve been spending (or rather Kazaa Lite has) the last couple weeks off and on downloading Wayne’s World, another nostalgia gem to replace an oxidizing Cinemax copy back in Frederick. An all around good time, made even sweeter by aloe yogurt and banana Pocky. Now if only I still had the amazing freedom of a college schedule. Hell, I’d be up until four playing Warcraft or half-attentively flirting with/mocking troglodytes in the AOL chat rooms. ::g::

Too bad the game absolutely blew chunks. Come on, walking saxphones and flood-fill backgrounds? The main (only) level music was just three notes long (looped)!!

Actually, I should have spent the evening on further planning for my next stupid thousand-dollar plus weekend, but eh, fuck it. I’ll wake up early and work on how to say “that’s hella expensive” in Shanghaiese.

Have you ever seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High? …a seminal 80s overblown buzzfest that sits nicely on the other end of the bookshelf across from The Breakfast Club. If only I understood what Phoebe Cates was doing with that carrot when it first came out. Actually, I probably would have been disgusted and/or bewildered, as a terrible shut down by Holly Rorrer in the third grade (she said her mother wouldn’t let her date me…probably) more or less turned me off to girls. That is, until the summer before ninth grade when I outgrew my Catholic school slacks and my off and on again best friend Lindsay Robinson. At that point there was a walk-a-thon around Frederick for some reason and I started my first adolescent infatuation with Lindsay’s friend Brette Lorosel [the spelling is completely wrong, I'm sorry], which went off great until my Dad dropped us off at mall after closing to see a late movie which had actually left town that day, leaving us walking around the parking lot for two hours. Too bad she became a lesbian (at least that’s what a laughing fellow Blockbuster co-worker told me three years later), or maybe things wouldn’t have been so uncomfortable when I applied for a job at the indie bookstore where she worked.

Such a small town, Frederick. Funny how it feels so big when I go back now though; all the shops you liked are closed and no one’s hanging out behind the Amber Meadows 7-11 anymore. It’s really kind of sad, if you think about it.

Numbers, details, and things a select few are privileged to care about

Well, it’s been a year on the blog. Omedetou gozaimasu! Congratulations. When I started last July at the behest of Michelle and Brandon, and I didn’t think it would last this long or grow to this scale. Looking back, I’ve noticed that right off the bat typos are far more prevalent in my earlier, titleless entries. This is disappointing because I really should check everything I write with the same degree of diligence, but I think it just wasn’t as important last year as it is now. Since blogger now tracks my averages and inputs, and there’s more of a _community_ about it, I feel a little more self-conscious and hold my material to a slightly higher standard (not that I’m trying to impress, it’s just that this has become important to _me_). In any case, now I have pictures, and links to other things, and as of today, slightly better support for browsers other than my own. It took Mozilla Firefox for me to realize I didn’t have a typeface specified in my font tags (deprecated I know, but I don’t fuss with CSS other than for my non-scrolling background). It still pisses me off that for all the glory that is non-IE browsers, they still can’t render whitespace the same way as IE. It drives me mad that the line breaks are wider in Mozilla, and as a result there’s too much wasted room and the top of this entry isn’t aligned with the menu on the left (which it should, because it’s just a damn table). Anyway, if this is one year, imagine how much better my presentation will be _next_ year (though I really can’t imagine getting rid of this tres’ chic background).

For those who are detail-oriented:
I have now exceeded two thousand hits since I started tracking in late January. That is 11.97 a day. *
I have linked to six hundred and three external pages *
I have written over fifty-six thousand words, which puts me past The Jungle Book, yet a far cry from War and Peace *
the text, images, and video I’ve put up locally consume over thirty megs of space *

Anyway, obviously someone is reading this journal daily (you know who you are, how many times do youreally check if I’ve updated?), however I have received only a single email via the address I have linked here (thank you, Cheryl). Well, enjoy my mind, and drop me a line sometime if I’m not conscious of your existence. I promise I’ll not ask you to buy my book.

Cheap, ugly software

I don’t have time to put together anything nice for photographs in bulk, so forgive me for the crudeness of my Bangkok collection. Some of the original pictures are really beautiful, but the factory program I used to pare them down to downloadable size virtually destroyed them. Anyway, I’ll leave the page up for a couple weeks and then take it down before it blinds anyone else. In the meantime, if you’re hungry for touristy photos of Thailand, bon appetite.

Snowed with nostalgia

It’s funny how quickly one’s memory can snap to attention when supplied with the proper music. I took a break this morning from my normal programming meat and potatoes of trance and instead took the route of mp3lib_vol8 (alt&oldies). Sure, it started out sensibly enough, MFC, Gerry and the Pacemakers. Then I hit Dion’s “Abraham, Martin, and John” and couldn’t shake memories of my spunky cousin Emily, and the smell of slowly decaying nylon-fiber industrial carpet in my grandmother’s basement. Frankie Valli came in strong with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”, and I remembered Amar [KING of the BRI-TONS] requesting the song at every damn party we threw first and second year. That was back when he was small, and loud.

Later on after some Zombies, Vogues, and Four Tops I was hit again with Dion, this time with “Runaround Sue” and images of Sharon Billington strumming a guitar in her erudite linoleum palace at Brown. I was so crazy about her for a while, but it didn’t work out. I remember going to TJ’s semi-formal together, and how absolutely enchanting she looked, lithe and glowing in that red and green dress. Corsages and butterflies in the stomach… When I was at Virginia I usually didn’t know what the deal was, or how to go about making it work. But I guess that’s okay, because none of the girls ever seemed to be able to make up their minds about what they wanted anyway. Stupid older, external boy swooning…why do they have to do that? The mass of honest men die teenage deaths at the hands of adolescent girls’ distorted fantasies. ::laughs::

Judy Collins finished the “oldies” section of my playlist. This time it’s “Both Sides Now”, but it makes me think of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days”, an ironic choice which I for some inconceivable reason listened to for the first half hour every time I started up Warcraft II. I started really getting into WC with Joe Chen, a quiet revolutionary who was viewed with wonderment by all. Here’s a guy that could plow through EE436, raze Orcen villages and write a song all in the manner of twelve minutes on a whim. An enigma, like most stabbingly brilliant people he didn’t seem to take notice. Joe was a fellow whose bedtime routine involved a full seven seconds of turning off the monitor and ripping the belt out of his jeans, his head already on the pillow of the top bunk before the buckle even hit the floor. I had a short-lived fascination with Sarah Michelle Gellar and one time at Parents’ Day I told my visiting father (half out of guilt, half out of comedy) that all of the magazine pages in our room (which had taken over not only the wall by my desk but all of the real estate above Joe’s bed) were of Joe’s girlfriend, who went to JMU. I miss him, I miss all the people that I admired so much, yet appeared to move through undergraduate so effortlessly.

For some reason Filter’s “Take a Picture” always puts me in the middle of some sunshine room of my Frederick life. On a yawn (why does that always happen?!) all previous reminiscing was bulldozed by the hurtling express of the inflatable pool I had as a child. Summers with no school, no clubs, no nothing. Just being clad in Snoopy Jams shorts and asking my mom to fill up that crazy wading pool in the backyard. The conversation would usually go like this, “Mom, please blow up the pool.” “No, not today. I’ll spend all that time getting it ready and you won’t even play in it.” “YES I WIILLL!!!” “(sigh)”.

A perennial fascination of mine, I marveled at the pool’s graceful arcing rings when filled properly with my tired mother’s breath. I loved how taut it would be, how I could push it and have it barely deform, yet nothing at all was inside but air. I derived secret pleasures from rubbing my finger over the surface when it was wet, and the plasticy, squeaky sound that followed in whines and pops along with my stuttering rhythm. It was hot when dry, so warm and soothing on my skin like a slab of fresh concrete on the sidewalk by our mailbox. Bugs would land in it and befall the doom of inescapable aquatic limbo from wet wings. I was reviled and fascinated with them at the same time, using one of my mother’s stainless colanders to siphon them out of my pristine water playland. Resolute and entranced, I would spend hours simply staring at the odd, bubbly shadows made on the bottom from blades of grass or the errant G.I. Joe leg. I think it was Disney, and every year in the radiant, temperate sun Donald’s beak got a little lighter, Minnie’s skirt all the more pale pink. It saddened me to no end when the season came that I could no longer sink down to my neck in the cool hose water, it just felt wrong when things became small enough not to be a world unto themselves anymore.

Lost on the streets of Vice City

For reasons of good marketing and musical nostalgia I picked up Grand Theft Auto: Vice City when I was in San Jose for the GDC in March. What began that one night after a cab ride from the mall ballooned into a daily obsession of Hawaiian shirts and the Thompson Twins. Initially I’d written the GTA franchise off as excessively violent and lacking true gameplay, but of course that was a narrow-minded statement founded only on comments from CNN media “pundits” and vague images of Nick Rosasco tooling around with the first game while Phil Dickinson laid on his bed reading Nitzche.

True, the subject matter is adult. I would never in good conscience give it to someone under the age of eighteen, but here the staid product review ends. It is a dream, a tv show, half a dozen to eight years of my life as I saw it and those with more liberal parents shared. The audio is undeniably the heart and soul [ugh] of the game– radio stations so real yet far more entertaining than anything I ever remembered experiencing while sitting in the backseat of my dad’s Corsica. The chatter is humorous, the songs are perfect, and the general writing of the game is impressive and full of quotables. It’s downright fun for any number of things to do.

The colors and the camera angles while driving a Countach down a neon-lit strip were so unforgettable they pervaded every corner of my life. I would ride my bicycle home from work, needlessly swerving around invisible cars while I hummed a tune by Foreigner. When disembarking a train or entering a building, I involuntarily slowed my step to match Tony Vercetti’s well-tuned swagger, imagining a primetime audience of adoring teenagers revering and noting with care my every movement. While cooking I occasionally would shout out to no one in particular “They fight like girls! Sniper on the roof!” or “Who’s ever seen a shark that big?!” After a little sleuthing I found a way to get the soundtracks off of the DVD and convert them to mp3s. Since then I’m often likely to vacuum or hang out the laundry while listening to Espantoso. VROCK DJ Lazlow is one of my friends, I feel like he’s the guy I always tried to take to a party and get laid, but beneath his cool cynicism he was too afraid to really even let a girl touch him.

Somewhere around the end of May poor software engineering reared its ugly head and corrupted my saved game, rendering some thirty hours of play and pilfering null and void. It took me about a month of scouring message boards and angry emails to Take Two (my former employer) before I could get something workable going. In the end the lost thirty hours became eight, and I resumed my rise to power in Vice City, taking blackmail photos of congressmen and knocking over banks with getaway taxis.

It’s over now, and I’ve beaten it, but the game doesn’t really “end”. You can still run around picking up incredibly inane packages and other such tasks for the obsessive or those with too much time. Though there are other games in the series, and more will come, I have a hard time believing that any could top the overall punch of Vice City. I’m sure I’ll play all the way through it again, if only to hear Umberto talk about wearing a dress and the size of his cahones. Until then, it’ll just float in the background, like a plastic, pink flamingo in your Camaro-owning neighbor’s pool.

Twelve hours of suffusing buzz

The strings are simple. They echo, and fall. Rob Solaris presents Mehran Rowshanzaden (Take Off Flight 007 Guestmix, second set), 00:19:13 in. Breathe. Wait.

The whole night is just fantastic. Grab it from torrent while you can (if you have the bandwidth and space for a gig of 192kbps anesthesia). Music for me is far beyond recreation, it’s a set of nutrients, and trance is my vitamin A. Without it I am dry, cracked and pale, not human but a sightless, withered ghost. It brings me harmony that starts at the end of my hair and percolates down into a soft, leather soul. The tracks just roll over me like waves, and I’m floating, falling through air and water while running over mossy, sun-soaked hills, into the back of an acutely taut photograph– a shot I have yet to take but will spend most of my young life in search of, just past sunrise, crossing through the smell of dew, sandalwood mornings. I want to melt into the fabric, and have my heart sigh with every cool-cheeked dreamer in perfect harmony.

…chasing after neon eyes and velvet…

Trips west, north, and center

It’s funny how things that start out as trivial can become compelling. Mikiko and I trekked out to Takao-san guchi last Saturday [hardly a trek, 47 min by special express from Shinjuku]. It’s a nice little village at the base of a forested mountain ridge that extends west out of Tokyo-to. When was in college, I’d hear other people talking about going hiking and getting groups together. It was like trendy, or something. At the time it sounded incredibly boring to me, and I couldn’t see how people wasted their time just walking through the woods. Well, of course it seems there will never be an end to the stupid assumptions I’ll make about things untried, and this case was no different.

Hiking is fun for a number reasons, the first I noticed was to feed my ego, that I could scramble up the most beat path in three quarters the suggested time and not even get tired. But I wasn’t going alone, so you kind of have to ditch the ego when doing things with other people. I think Miki and I had a good time together. We got some exercise, pretended that we could see flying squirrels, and pointed out my house far away, a tiny dot on the bay plateau so far to the east (it’s easy to spot since I live so close to some of the tallest buildings in Tokyo).

The basic idea for the toy is you have to knock one of the center pieces out with the mallet and keep the rest balanced on each other.

The people in the village were nice, and I bought a couple Japanese traditional toys for myself and other lucky individuals upon my inclination to post or return home. There was a totally sweet early 80s pearl yellow Countach parked outside one of the little shops. I agreed with Mikiko that it seemed out of place, but damn did it look fine. One of the shopkeepers and I jawed about it for a couple minutes before heading home. I was too embarrassed to snap a picture of it though, after having an embarrassing experience with a 911 Targa owner a couple weeks before.

…Originally recorded May 5/20/04…

A bar in Chitose-Karasuyama

Jim and Miles Davis are feeling alone in a bar of four men. Beat up, down, bass 1, 2, 3, 4. Gone, do I care for the past left behind that I fear? Samishii! Too bad. Pity the fellow at the corner for conversation he’s a boy but looks a man tired and alone from walking too many late night blocks home alone down fourteenth street

and I can’t play…piano.