autumn tactics

Menthol cigarettes, chianti reserva, Miles Davis and sandalwood.

Sometimes life slows down, whether you really want it to or not. Maybe because you need it to. Maybe because that’s all you can take.

I rode my bicycle home, slowly, and took a shower. I rinsed out the cans in the sink and put on an undershirt. I slouched down into the sofa and got my deal handed to me straight by a Chinese girl. I’m attractive between my forehead and my mouth. I’m quiet.

I sat down at my desk and thought about modality, I sat down at my desk and thought about ego.

Why don’t I get a girlfriend? I cook sometimes, with spices. In China big televisions are cheap, but in Japan life is good. Work is good, the city is good. Lots of things are good.

The scales are blue and in a ten-measure cycle. My life is blue and in some kind of cycle.

Life is kind of blue.

What is it that calls to me, that simmers through my heart? Is it the bass? Or the treble? Or the smiles on young faces and the flare in every eye? Trucks, tents, and incense; grass, rock, and sky. The sweat between cotton fibres and under tousled hair. A light unseen, in a wider spectrum than any machine dreams of. The beat. The anticipation. The flow. Shake and froth, the filter sweeping while it cuts. Dusk melts pastel candied skies, my skin crawls through sound check testing 1..2..3..

Abandon your manmade shells and slide into the twilight– naked, alive as you were first born and radiant as the gods intended.

Welcome the softly loving night.

Does something tribal call inside of you? Not as men and women but as boys and girls and something deeper than that. Like the fire that keeps you transfixed with drunken awe, some sort of primal power sits on your eyelids and jerks at your knees. Colors fall and repeat, noise rattles off of aluminum and quakes through mud. So stop and start relaizing those emotions rooted deep under the topsoil of your soul. This is the time to break free the soft flesh of youth inside of the yesterday you.

Lantern slep fall my heart,
skin splits open and breaks apart.
From inside another you,
moving back to whence it grew.

私は私の中にあります。どうやら一人に居る？
何を探してるを思いつかない。

Woken up in the morning, there was a fragrance hanging on. There was a painting hung in my heart and a melody strung around my head. I’d be asleep for so long, I’d nearly forgotten it. But the sunshine and the flowers were calling, and I ran outside barefoot to meet them.

They were sitting
They were sitting on the strawberry swing
Every moment was so precious

Could be blue
I don’t mind
Without you it’s a waste of time
– Coldplay

A clouded sky, under a twenty-thousand foot canopy of still grey. Towering, slim evergreens reach across the ceiling like well used acrylic brushes. Moving without sound with expectation, with so much determination with direction, with longing, with cold dispatch. Explosions of color in water, slowly diffusing into starkly back lit glass. To do everything with purpose, and gravity.

To do everything… with purpose and gravity.

expression.

through a lattice of shade
from an autumn sun,
the joyful youth of Tokyo
assembled.

blades of tall grass and smiling faces
sunglasses, blue jeans, and cigarettes
the air is damp with vapor rub incense.
bass ricochets through trees and
rattles in concert with sub-way below.

staring at my thumbnail I realized
the primary difference between
photography and music: time.
I’m sweaty sunk in that celebration–
the weekend a 48 hour drag
on a glorious 4-D joint.

on being

what is techno what is love?

to illuminate or fade, so many choices at instants in our life.
unthought, unspoken, unfelt, but in the pit of our souls a gear is turning.

yes today was x, y, and z.
tomorrow I will do great things and be songworthy
but no… yet no…

now we are faced with a challenge as always:
to burn, or to fold.
tomorrow is uncertain, now the blood of time is within you.
so ignite! so shine!
so give every last drop of your beautiful broken life to the stars,
for only in this instant will they weep for you!

on dancing

pulse until you drop thrive shake and spin
do not listen to the music!
run ahead of it!

you already know the next four beats, this is obvious.
they have telegraphed themselves into your brain,
you need only to complete the sequence.
it is a game of chess encoded in the rhythm of raindrops;
you have no choice honestly except to submit to their will.

So, Design Festa has ended, much sooner than I expected, actually. Friday night I toiled updating my poems and assembling my concept summary until morning, returning from the Southern Tower Kinko’s as the sky grew light at 4:30 Saturday morning. After sleeping for two hours and being dead to my alarm, the impatient calls from my ride at seven threw me into a dash of assembly until 12:15, over an hour past the show opening. I foolishly thought that being the second time around I’d be more prepared and installation would go smoother, but again this time I had nearly twice the materials as the last, and my booth setup was more complicated than my previous outing. Thank the Lord I had friends with me to put it together. Without them, there would have been no show

Then with a sweat-frosted brow, I stood proudly in my skiing cowboy shirt, eyes alight nostrils flaring, continuing on energy that came from some sort of environmental tap. Balancing on my toes, rocking over my knees I smiled, beamed, and gestured. I explained what Tokyo meant to me, what my goals were for the future, how the buildings and the colors, the stories witnessed and imagined all drove me nearly insane with ardor that simply must be redirected onto these two dozen pieces of coloured paper.

I didn’t eat for thirty hours, just absently sipping plastic bottled sports drinks between the waves of young girls that drifted in and out of my booth. When I sensed someone was not in a hurry and genuinely looking at my wrinkled black canvas, I intruded making a slight bow and offered a headset playing a remixed version of Leonid’s Crater. The ambient river that I coaxed out of the microKORG mingled with samples of clacking heels, passing bicycles, and slowly withdrawing automobiles. Birds warbled and summer cicadas sang: so much shuffled and tinkling green tea powder over a sublime layer of mint cake. The sound was well-received and led to conversations, long moments where I forgot my humility and sped on feverishly, taking every question and using it as a springboard into a clammy reel of my philosophy. Perhaps too emphatic, after finishing a complete revolution of my spiel, conversation often dropped off sharply and my exhaustion precluded common sense, ending each meeting with a weak smile and a passing of my business card.

I sold a dozen or so postcards, gave away a handful more, and at the end of the day had so much in my mind of how I would improve upon it all next time, during packing up and the train ride home I was virtually catatonic.

Already a bushel of future concepts have risen up in my mind like sprouting weeds after a long summer rain. I don’t have time to enumerate them all right now, because this is the stream of consciousness post, and I don’t have the gallery assembled yet anyway. Give me a day or two and then you can see the collective fruits of my efforts (and maybe even hear them).

Not much, apparently. Actually even though I had a couple days off last week for Golden Week, much like last Christmas there was very little resting going on. I didn’t even make a 36-hour trip to Kyoto this time. I went to the park like once.

I’ve been grinding my gears with Photoshop, OpenMPT, and the microKORG over the past month. I forget if I mentioned it, but I’m currently working on a show and this time I have a theme. The good thing about this is if I pull it off, it’s a lot easier to connect with the guests, increasing the chances of having some sort of lasting effect on someone. The bad thing is that my tool usage skills are behind the curve for what I hope to accomplish.

I have sixteen days. If you have a spare moment, send me an angel.

Though I can’t really claim to have had any significant downtime in the last four years, I do have a standard that I’ve maintained for more or less half a year. A normal day starts with one hour waking up/shower, thirteen hours communting/work, one and a half hours dinner/television, one hour reading news/comics on the computer, half an hour tidying/getting ready for bed, and then roughly six-seven hours of sleep. I used to analyze it thinking I could improve it somehow, but there are constants which fighting will only exhaust you more.

After I got back from Paris last May and registered for GEISAI, I made plans for a restructured schedule, and got into it really during the summer, at which point I spiraled into an intense three months of simply work (corporate) + work (private). It was tiring, it was exciting, and it ended in a sleepless daze that I vaguely remember. Afterwards I “took a break” which meant going back to “the standard”, and not touching my camera or synth for about six weeks. It didn’t exactly get me back to like-new condition.

But, an idle mind is a crazy one, for me, so perhaps it’s best that I stay near the cusp of exhaustion fighting for something that only makes sense to me.

Now that I am “idle”, and have a lot of time on my hands, I decided I needed another improbable goal to motivate me to tighten the screws on my regimen. The next GEISAI is proported to occur sometime in the summer, and a tentative art show four months away isn’t enough of a impetus to spur me to serious action, so I made a spur of the moment decision. I squeezed through the closing door of DESIGN FESTA 25 registration and got myself a booth for Saturday the 26th of May.

My gosh! That’s less than seven weeks away! How in the world will I put together a display of artwork that’s a substantial improvement over last autumn in half the time?

Good question, let’s find out.

faint linen petals
sunlight falls in spring
deftly rise and climbing
the hollows of my cheeks

below grey skies
and leafless trees
you spent your winter alone

walking down wet stone streets
to the sound of car tires in rain
half asleep you found your way home

but the bread was dry
and the long nights empty
a space full of things
but little warmth

you spent all that time
by yourself just searching
for what unsure, but nobly

through the months quietly on
an independent sort of dream
a barren winter of adagio

Full moon, tranquil night.

By pale lamp post I rest awhile in Maruyama Park. Water gurgles from a fountain to the west; occasionally a dog cries out in frustration. Lovers chat on a nearby bench, and far away in Gion an ambulance murmurs.

A puddle, the rock.
January second, the start of winter, yet thinking I do not grow cold. My mind is filled with a hundred deliberations, but the space around me just says, “Stop.”

Stop all this nonsense, stop the spinning of wheels. Stop fumbling through things only half aware of what’s going on. This time was given to heal, heal the mind, heal the body. This time is meant to be used for restitution. Yet for four years I’ve sought restitution, and only managed to leave a thousand doors half-opened.

What is the ideal? Can there be a paradigm? If there were an example, or a prophet, then quickly I could emulate that style. Why does growing older and knowing more mean having diminishing answers and multiplying questions? Is ignorance the true nirvana? Or is this a crossing in a forest, and the myriad paths will with time merge back into one? I’d like to think that at worst, through trial, I’ve found what the answer is not, so this narrowing of choices will one day reveal the way. But in prolonged emptiness I’ve lost confidence, and now looking back with doubt at each temrinated road I worry that one if not many were correct, and I only gave up too soon or applied too little perseverance. Now this lack of focus taints every endeavour I make, so the quality of everything suffers as a consequence, dragging me deeper and deeper into the quagmire of obscurity.

A thinker sits, his blog the stage, to an audience two billion ripe, all caught up in the act of one from a troupe two billion poets strong.

As the ambient light fades the ducks quack indifference, and the whistle crossing signal of Sanjobashi consumes the waning day.

Oh, but why? How a winter’s day by the Kamo can chill a man. No sun, no snow, just damp and stone. How else could the day be spent? But so much, so many things… how many do await in this old city for a traveller and a thinker? But money does not buy happiness, oh no. With money comes so much baggage, so much regret, like a city, not your own, but only belonging to someone else, now gone.