autumn tactics

I am back. For those who were out of the loop I was in Austria and Italy for a week. I have something to the order of 20 blog entries and 600+ shots from the trip. It will take me honestly weeks to get through them all, so please be patient. Right now I have to spend the next 144 hours at least focusing on Design Festa 28, which is this weekend. I am in complete ordered chaos as nothing is done, but somehow I will assemble a show with unique and original content. In the meantime, enjoy this corny picture of St. Mark’s Square and keep your eye on the blog.

Ciao.

Yegveny’s impeccable dedication to quality continues on. Now our second movie of the flight has started, it’s what seems to be a 1960s Technicolor puppetoon film in the vein of Tom Thumb or Babes in Toyland.

This starry-eyed young man in some tavern says goodnight to the girl he’s in love with, and then starts talking to the marionettes in the common room. We have wide screen VHS but Japanese subtitles, and sound that only comes in once every seven seconds or so. So I am watching this grainy fairy tale (some Mother Goose lady is yelling down a well now, the starry-eyed boy is now in some kind of dream land I guess, wearing a toy solidier uniform and moving through a cave of skeletons while the old lady directs him from outside the well). Anyway, no audio I thought I’d put some BGM to the film, and since Russian hop-hop didn’t fit, I went with elevator music. But this channel is now some kind of Tales from the Crypt radio show.

So to summarize, I’m listening to what sounds like a Russian haunted house narrator, watching some Technicolor folktale, and reading very crude Japanese subtitles. And to think I was bemoaning the lack of alcohol for this trip (yes, it’s an all charge system, despite the eleven hour flight).

Old lady danced off, the hero wants to get back up, shoots his musket up at the winch outside the well that lowers the bucket. Climbs out and is now chasing after a cartwheeling grandma while we have closeups of a cat intercut into the film. Old lady’s head is cut off, rolls across the ground, her body replaces it with cabbage. Gold coins fall out of the old lady’s basket, and now the cat is transformed into some Chaplin-looking dude. Maybe he was under a spell or something from the witch.

Money talks. After a song and dance routine involving milk maids picking potatoes in the field and a bunch of chimney sweeps, the soldier returns to the candy colored town and with the aid of some gold coins at the city gate gets into town. Now he’s running around getting all gussied up in the latest pastels and what not, I guess with all that loot he took from the woman he beheaded.

Well, the movie stopped and has been off for about ten minutes or so. I suppose someone complained about the lack of audio and the politburo decided that in the interests of equality no movie was better that movie sans sound.

I like looking at the map of Asia as time goes by. I get to see the names of all of the Siberian cities. A good number of them are familiar to me since I read Farley Mowat’s The Siberians a couple years ago. Talk about your weird media choices. Here’s a book that was written thirty some years ago during the peak of Soviet expansion for natural resource exploitation. Farley Mowat is an interesting guy to start with, but him writing about a time, place, and culture completely foreign to me (and him) adds so many layers of imagination it’s mind-boggling. I’ve never even seen a picture of Siberia, but the images in my mind are fantastic; endless snow, quiet, sparsely populated frontier towns, scrub tree lines, constantly dark, overcast skies, and a cavalcade of vivacious, land-hardened individuals pounding vodka like its going out of style and raving about the future of engineering and the Soviet Economy.

The Siberians is probably the bulk of the reason that I’ve dreamt of going to to Russia for so long. My expectations are so high; actually going there and spending time alone under that great, big, sky is surreal. I think it would be both a long and difficult trip, being off the beaten path as it is. Like China, I have to apply for a visa even to get into the country for a short vacation.

(An Olsen twins movie dubbed in Russian started and then was promptly abandoned after about a minute of opening credits.)

Another fragment of things about Russia I recall from my youth is a reputation for engineering of questionable quality. Towards the end of middle school I developed a voracious appetite for automobile literature. Hot Rod, Car and Driver, Porsche restorer’s guides, two-stroke engine manuals, I tore through it all. In particular, I remember an editorial from 1992 Road & Track that told of all the amazing ways a Russian lemon could prove a formidable challenge for its owner. Right now, my reading light will not operate and I am forced to do my clerical work in the dark. This may be an American-made Boeing but Vginny’s dopey grin has got me thinking that this cannot be a simple coincidence. Fortunately my Visor has delightfully retro monochrome night vision so I can type. Tagging my Italian conversation book will have to wait until later.

One thing that came to mind while trying to find a sleeping position that didn’t involve a steel protrusion into my back was how does immigration work on trains in Europe? The reason it occurred to me is because I haven’t been able to get Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road” out of my head for the last three days. There’s that intro to National Lampoon’s European Vacation where Chevy Chase’s passport starts out crisp and new but as the credits are displayed it gets progressively more chewed up until it’s a barely tenable mess of stamps, tears, and coffee stains. If I enter Austria via the airport, then get on a overnight train to Italy at Westbahnhof, do I have to go through emigration before I board the train? Or does it happen near the border, or, what? The same goes for entering Italy at like five in the morning, sometime when I’m asleep presumably. It’s not like they’re going to come into the compartment and wake us all up and ask us if we have anything to declare.

I’d say that the train ride is probably the biggest dodgy part of this whole trip. I read there is a train overnight from Vienna to Venice, the Allegro. However, knowing only that I booked (I think) a ticket in a sleeper car and paid with my MasterCard via the Austria rail system’s website, which I can’t even pronounce. The English version of the page didn’t seem to work for international travel so I just fumbled through it running the text surrounding the form fields through Babelfish. There were probably any number of “You must agree to be informed of this” sections that I just completely ignored.

After I received what looks like a digital ticket via email I considered my blind groping validated and immediately claimed complete victory. I really have no solid proof that I actually succeeded in producing anything other than a perceived waste of forty-nine euros, so hopefully someone at the hostel registration will be knowledgeable and kind enough to let me know if I’ll be walking to Italy or not.

Once again I am fortunate enough to be in the position to visit hereto countries known only to me via American movies, which means every mundane event is subject to quiet ridicule. Though this week I will travel to both Vienna, Austria and Venice, Italy, I am traveling via Soviet Era air juggernaut Aeroflot, even transferring in Moscow.

This is no minor joy for me. When I went to Thailand, I had a small collection of stereotypes involving Anna and the King, Kickboxer, and Sagat. However, the former Soviet Union was a virtually limitless source of intrigue and propganda for the duration of the Cold War. A record score of James Bond and Tom Clancy films has provided me with Siberian-sized expectations of what and who to encounter, to say nothing of Rocky IV and virtually every male-targeted cartoon series from the 1980s.

Right now my obsessive imagination has reached a fever pitch while listening to the magnificent crescendos of The Hunt for Red October. The captain has just come over the PA in classic, on-the-mark, beleaguered Russian drawl, informing the crew of today’s flight time and destination. I will pepper the rest of my writing all the way to Vienna with a nearly endless tirade of heavily accented movie quotes.

“Most things in here don’t react well to bullets.”

It’s amusing, because you see so much of the stereotypes of Russian characters in film and then when you actually run into real people, it’s so entertaining to find copious amounts of evidence to back it up. This plane is full of tall, thin guys with fair skin and blindingly blond hair or burly comrades with dark hair and beards thick enough require a machete for shaving. Even the CG passenger on the safety video looks like Ed Harris. I wonder how long until our complementary 3-euro Stoly.

Apparently the alcohol isn’t the only thing that costs extra when traveling Aeroflot. The vinyl backing from the seat in front of me seems to be separating from the chair proper. Though this isn’t a huge deal, I just hope Vginny the grinning Aeroflot maintenance technician spends more time checking the avionics than the cabin amenities. I haven’t flown on a 767 in a long time, most of the international flights I run into these days are A320s. My seat doesn’t recline as there is a wall directly behind it, but fortunately this isn’t a huge deal as I am the only person in my row. I may do the pull-up-the-armrest-and-lay-across-three-seats thing in a bit. The dearth of provisions (my inflight-snack was a wet tissue) on the flight will make it hard to get through the full ten and half hours conscious. I anticipated something like this and brought a litre of oolongcha and some Pretz to ration. I wonder what we get to see on the crusty CRT monitor hanging near the lavatory. I hope it’s more than just the Aeroflot commercial presumedly designed to make me feel better about my airline selection (read: the only airline with seats available two weeks’ before departure). The blankets, oddly enough, are quite nice, a retro quilting in UVa orange and blue with the hammer and sickle logo. I may have to have a rare ethical blackout while one finds its way Kenderlike into my bag.

“Brainstorming is one of the best products of American thought. All the modern gangs use it.” Object modeling.

Valentin: “Do you have any idea how long the winter lasts in this country? Tell him, Dmitri.”
Guard: “Well, it depends…”
Valentin: “SILENCE!”

Who just totally made a European train ticket reservation COMPLETELY IN GERMAN?

Me. That’s who.

Damn, this language stuff is EASY. Give me a stopwatch and a map, and I’ll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows.

Through the quiet countryside, far from the bullet trains and shouting storefront hawkers, I ride home through a melting rain.

Rice fields, toylike pickup trucks and elegant thatched rooves, the features foreign but the experience somewhat familiar. We pass through a grove and the sea appears, next to me. Gentle waves crash on porous rocks and somewhere, far past the blurred horizon are whispers of Russia.

Kururi trickles, drops, and plucks, a flock of small birds take off from a bushy dune. The train punches through a series of mountains and I flick through my travel playlist, searching for something fresh that suits my mood. The girl sitting next to me gets up and heads to the next car and I land on Coltemonikha, the train breaks back into daylight and waves crash just meters off to my left.

The reverb hangs around forever like a haze, the drum machines pop and synthetic cymbals crackle, rising to a rush and everything falls silent for a measure until Kate Sakai’s windy, sampled voice draws my heart back into cocoon.

I don’t know what to expect, nor do I really care at this point. Any time I can get away from Tokyo and the Yamanote line, it’s a success.

This weekend I have come to the Chubu region for the first time, running through Niigata straight to the Sea of Japan and down the coastline to Toyama. Like most of my domestic trips, I have rough goals of studying Buddhist relics and middle class life outside of the metropolis.

The buildings, trains, land all bear a faded magenta tint. I wonder if it’s particles in the air, left over from Toyama’s prewar shipbuilding industry. Everything feels like late afternoon the Midwest, and the open spaces suit my brooding mood. Last night I sat alone on the concrete steps of the fishing pier and watched the sun fall across the horizon to eventually be consumed by the sea.

I feel tired, but satisfied. My senses are dulled enough that they filter out most of what’s going on around me, but the quaint, cheery courtesy of the people I interact with pops through and fills me with a rich, complete feeling.

Smoothing out the waves…

My first day, New Year’s, took me to Hiraizumi in Iwate. I forgot a number of important items but managed to hack something together with parts from the Ichinoseki ekimae Lawson. I also had oden from a konbini for the first time. It wasn’t bad. After arriving at Hiraizumi, I got set up in my room by 3:00 and then headed out to take as many pictures as I could before dark fell on the quiet, snowy town. I ended up going to Chuusonji and had a cup of amazake while watching the hundreds of temple goers stream up Gogatsu no Saka for hatsumode. I returned to my ryokan at dusk and spent a blissful half-hour spacing in front of a roaring gas furnace before an enormous supper. Though I planned to get a lot done in Photoshop at night, the touch pad combined with some ridiculously grainy Ilford Delta stymied my efforts. It took an hour just to perform dust and scratch removal from fifteen mediocre shots.

Afterwards I gave up on the PC and watched the TV for a couple of hours, the standard New Year’s celebrity shows, before turning in early for the night.

Wednesday I got a lot of mileage out of my day hitting all of the historical sites in the center of town before I had to leave at two. Transfers at Ichinoseki and Morioka were subdued, not many people in Japan travel on January second. I spent half an hour lay over each time and stood on the end of deserted, hulking, hangar-like station platforms watching a sunburst melt over snow-covered warehouses.

Basho came to Hiraizumi to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Yoshitsune’s death. It was then, seeing the open fields, all that remained of the once great Fujiwara monuments, that he wrote the famous haiku to sum up mankind’s fleeting glory.

Natsukusa ya (Ah, summer grass)
Tamedomo ga (All that remains from the ruin)
Yume no ato (of warriors’ dreams)

Though I always turn off my iPod when I enter a temple or shrine, I’ve spent most of my time walking around listening to the solemn half of the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack. While this is fitting, reinforcing the muted, cold atmosphere I half-wished to find on this trip, this is not completely fair. Music, like any other form of art, can be used in recreation to serve us. We see what we want to see, we hear what we want to hear, and we feel what we want to feel. Walking around with headphones all the time reinforces any barriers we already have built up around us, encased in our our little private bubbles. This cannot continue for very long without adverse effect.

So I took off the headphones to leave my mind to idle though. As I further realized when walking through the jukai of Aokigahara, it’s not long before I start making nonsensical remarks to myself, quoting movies and books, frequently in an absurd voice. Before stopping for afternoon tea I wondered aloud if Basho talked to himself three hundred years ago, and if he did, did he quote popular theatrical comedy of the day, pausing to chuckle at how amused with himself he was?

Today I’m starting out on my four-day tour of Tohoku (northeast Japan). I’ve been planning it for days, and set got so many pieces of the puzzle put together in advance, but somehow still managed to first miss the train I hoped for by oversleeping, and then fail to estimate what time it really was and had to run to the station to make the next departure on time. In the process I made quick grab-and-run decisions that I may end up regretting in the next couple of days. The first of these is bringing the 5D, the second leaving behind my tripod. I also forgot the Holga and my positioner. I also declined to bring the Happy Hacking keyboard with me, which leaves me with only the working set of keys on the WinBook (this does not include escape, five, six, zero and consequently right parenthesis]. But all twenty-six letters of the alphabet work, and my current login password doesn’t contain any of the dead keys, so I’m fine as long as the five-year old Li-Ion battery holds up. At least I didn’t pull any boners like leave the power supply at home. I’ve done this with cameras before though.

To get back to the actual trip, I’m travelling to Tohoku, in particular Hiraizumi in Iwate prefecture, and fan favorite Kakunodate in Akita. One of the many challenges in this journey is time management, many in the realm of transportation. In Tokyo where the Yamanote line comes every two minutes, in the country trains come once an hour, and if one’s transfers don’t line up nicely with the sparse number of departures, a nice long fifty minutes or so is spent in the cold staring off of the station platform into rice fields. Today I have to transfer four times to get to my destination, and in the end I have a fifty-minute layover to travel one station. Maybe I’ll get a bus. Maybe I’ll decide to tough it out and walk. Who knows. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get a seat on the bullet train. Maybe not and I’ll be standing. That brings to mind one more thing I forgot to bring: a book.

This was a good weekend. I got to do what I enjoy best: exploring, learning, and taking pictures. I also was able to talk to some new people. If you talk to almost anyone the first time, there’s always a sense of freshness, hope, and innocence. I want to believe the more I talk to people the better I’ll get at it, and maybe somewhere along the way I’ll find a little peace. But for now at least I know I need to be the center of attention, whether because I’m spoiled or just lonely. I love two-way conversation. I want so much to believe that if I just be myself, people will like me for it. it’s so hard holding back all of the tempestuous fire in my heart that swells with the tides. Oh to be a dreamer and alone.

When I was in elementary school, the annual book fair was always a time of great anticipation. How many yarn-tasseled Garfield bookmarks could I con mom into buying me this year? One time I bought a book, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. At the time I thought that it was related to Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective, in which the main character was named Basil. However, this was not the case as my mother informed me before buying it, but stubborn and not wanting to believe such depressing news, I insisted I knew this and wanted the book nonetheless. So, she bought it and it did indeed end up about being nothing about detectives or mice named Basil, but it was a very interesting read about two children who run away and live in a museum for a number of months. The image of all those toilets to oneself; the kind of comfort that comes only from the absolute pristine silence of dozens of toilets all to oneself, was strangely appealing. There is a similar line in the film With Honors; Joe Pesci makes such a comment about the bliss of living in a Harvard library.

I have a similar situation presented to me now, the only patron in a camping area with dozens of empty, tidily swept lodges. I enjoyed heavenly twenty minute trips to the ice cold toilets, slowly savoring my third read of The Dharma Bums.

Today was indeed a day spun in stories. Like a lot of times my assumptions and plans were all nonsense, but i was lucky to have people showing me the way. I climbed a 1200 meter mountain, I rode a horse, I picked my way through suicide woods at desk, I went spelunking in a bat cave, I bathed in hot water springs and ate one of the most perfect meals of my entire life. Twelve miles, thirteen hours, and a sense of deep satisfaction. I have half a bottle of the most delicious win but Japhy was right, in the mountains the air is thin and you don’t crave it. Kerouac was telling the truth, and I know how he felt…

Too physically active to drink, and something of completeness, and the hope to start a new direction in one’s life. The silence is almost maddening. [It was at least until a deer scream from the forest behind sent me quaking deeper into my Carinthia.]

I have over half a dozen unfinished blog posts sitting in the queue, awaiting grammatical edits, lyrics, and photos. The problem is that my WordPress db was axed a last week and now I’m in a disorganized knot.

I think this is okay, because I sense that readership is down anyway… lots of photographs, half-thoughts.

This weekend I’m going to a hippie village in the middle of nowhere for a rave over the three-day holiday. I anticipate much writing, photography, psytrance, experimenting, and live, clucking poultry. If we’re lucky, I’ll muster the concentration and perseverance to get it up here for you to read about.

Things are such a mess right now, I wish I could go to bed and wake up an absolute master of HLSL.

Sweat beads cover my shoulders; sleek arms glisten in the setting sun.
The echoes of a guitar ring far away; below the river crawls east.
Dusk falls on an empty city, and wordlessly I welcome the night.

Ya basta llorar
mi vida alindar
no te quiero ver sufrir
con tristeza y dolor

–The Green Car Motel

Je suis revenu de mes vacances à la Corée, toutefois je suis toujours en vacances à la maison parce que maintenant c’est obon. Je passe mes jours dans la ville prenant des photographies. Il fait chaud. Le ciel est bleu, et les pluies du soleil vers le bas sur mes épaules nues. J’erre, d’un air endormi observant le écoulement des touristes le long de l’avenue ombragée.

Pourquoi la vie me fascine-t-elle ainsi?