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August 11th, 2006
02:42 am
As shoes go by I notice: black black black brown black brown black black black black brown black. Mine are blue with yellow toes. Toes that would be steel if they were boots but they're not, they're sneakers so the toes are plastic. The gin in the blue square bottle rushes down between the glacial crevices in the glass. I hand it over. No tip.
For three hours I've become a(n actor playing the part of a) seasoned bartender, or should I say seasonal, here for a fraction of summertime and working at a wedding in this fancy hotel, chandeliers and tablecloths, and between them a pair of old European family lines that are weaving their own continued existence through the promisingly strong strands of a boy and a girl, who stand together today at the sharp pressure point of a massive inverted pyramid of classy ladies, awkward juveniles, crazy uncles, and craggily straight males who clap each other on the back, alternately congratulating & deprecating, standing heavily, swaying slightly. Erik's injured, which is why I'm here at all; he pulled a muscle in his back and I came along as his brawn-for-hire. He tells me what to do when there's time to talk, which is not often because there are 400 guests and every last one of them wants to be wasted. The mixed drinks are easy when their names are easy. Gin and tonic. Rum and coke. Vodka and cranberry. Scotch and soda. A woman informs me she's the maiden, no wait, the mother of the groom. She's got a head start, I kind of half-smile, wondering if I'm supposed to say something, but I merely penetrate an olive with a tiny cocktail sword and slip it into her drink alongside a slim pair of straws.
During a lull Erik surreptitiously pours a shot for himself and another for me, but after last night (the art opening, sake house, gay bar, a dearth of dancing, stumbling back to Casey's place and in the door and directly into his innocently bystudying roommate's bedroom where, slurring shamelessly, I find myself starting a completely ridiculous argument ("your homework is philosophically impossible!") just to keep him talking after I notice his voice is smooth and melodic the longer i listen the more it sounds like singing and eventually I collapse on the couch, waking later to discover the world reeling away as though it were attached to my retinas through a multitude of capricious strings connected to some whirring mechanical apparatus of pulleys and winches disengaged from any prior contraptional context) the drink holds little appeal. I leave it on the bar, where it shimmers like a diamond with refracted light.
Standing on the periphery of a wedding. A stone skimming, wet, soon sinking, but never swimming. I wonder from how many angles I will ultimately touch the emphasized plural singular platonic ideal of Marriage, from how many directions I'll be able to tap lightly with an outstretched toe (yellow, plastic) as though upon a sheer veneer of fragile ice that cracks with each touch because it cannot, at present, support my weight, not even after a hypothetical stretch of solitary sexless starvation to which I'd never attempt subjecting myself, ever. But then these are progressive times, people say so and I do believe them, when I am being reasonable.
Black black black brown black brown black. As I help the predictably shod, predictably clad guests get through their friction-ridden ritual I don't bother hiding my shoes beneath the bar because, in their informally dismal way, they seem appropriate as representative of my place relative to this icily vast antarctic penguin-suited incarnation of what is said to be our greatest and most personal of social institutions: black black black black brown black black brown brown black brown black blue.
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June 13th, 2006
03:18 pm
After dinner, as we're driving back through Himeji on sleepy narrow lamplit roads, Hiromi suddenly points out the window and says, look! Above us to the left there's a tower lit up against the sky, close by, looming largely and brightly, a terrestrial full moon. We missed the turn so Raka pulls a k.
Out of the car there are steps leading up in the direction of the tower, which is still somewhat distant; the crunch of little stones underfoot comes as a surprise to Hiromi, who tells us so. Past the steps: a garden, a terrace of trees lit from floodlights below, glowing plumes of brilliant green foliage. A rectangular pond with ornate circumambient lanterns, the length of the lights' fill falling off perfectly to create an atmosphere that is simultaneously dark and colorful, reflections in the water, moon hazily visible through clouds, orb spiders suspended in widely woven webs, gray but not colorless, one next to a tree larger than any I've ever seen before. A path through the trees amid a vocal colony of frogs, lights of the city visible down past a small wall.
The tower up close is unbelievable, unreal, yellow and blue-tinted lights filtered through leaves carefully layered across its smooth surface. The edges of the lights on the angled stone allow the reading of a linear pattern of sculpture, sure motions down the tower with a chisel. Shadowy steps lead up to a wall walk round the tower; we all hesitate a moment before ascending. Look at each other: a bit gloomy, ne? But so beautiful.
On the tower (could it really be fashioned out of one vast stone, as it appears to be, as if from the impossible tusk of a colossal mammoth?) Hiromi points again and I look across the valley to see Himeji-jo, the great castle, lit up like a celestial twin akin to this structure, its classically tiered architecture distinct even from here. Higher up than any other structure in Himeji, the Castle appears to float on the horizon, similar to the suspended globe clock in Kasai; instantly recognizable & reliable like a lighthouse, a manmade mountain.
A few hours earlier, as the car sped past an intricately interconnected grove of power lines, Raka had asked me: could you be happy living in Himeji? No, I'd said, because for me to be truly happy living in a city, I think there'd have to be a Chinatown in it someplace - not because I'm especially fond of Chinatowns per se, but rather because containing a Chinatown marks a city in a certain way, as a certain size and type, as home to a powerful energy & diversity, as my kind of city.
But walking back to the car, past the trees and stone ramparts with city lights beyond, I remember this, and in my head I silently amend: Any city with a Chinatown... or a castle.
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June 7th, 2006
12:43 pm
Atsushi keeps handing me things from the front seat: his cigarettes, lighter, a bottle of citrus cola, his cell phone (neon yellow and green), an ashtray can. I can't hold on to everything and the lighter falls to the floor; I brace objects here and there and retrieve it as the car careens down the streets of Osaka, two teenage boys in a red crosswalk dodging in opposite directions, they're laughing. We turn a corner amid a flock of white-clad bicyclists and on a relatively calm straightaway everyone lights a cigarette, me and Atsushi and his girlfriend, whose name I can't remember because I can only remember names I hear at least twice and I only heard hers once. She's stunning, absolutely gorgeous, and I remember a poem by Richard Brautigan:
JAPANESE WOMEN
If there are any unattractive
Japanese women
they must drown them at birth
I met Atsushi when I was last in Japan, in January; he was working in a clothing store in a tunnel beneath the Kobe railway. I came in during a day of solo wandering while Raka attended a JET conference and we somehow had a two hour conversation through our thick language barrier (motions of semiliterate sign language behind textured glass), his English better than my horrible Japanese, but not by much. He showed me his CD collection: Godspeed, Squarepusher, No Knife. He bought me a plastic bottle of green tea out of a vending machine: a "wanderink." On Saturday I found him again in Kobe, this time with Raka present to translate, and he asked me to come play music with him; he's a drummer. So while Raka was singing indeterminately cheerful Japanese songs with her students, I was, on my second try, catching a bus bound for Osaka.
Atsushi pulls into a space in a tiny parking lot on a side street. Out of the car I return his entourage of objects, take the borrowed electric guitar from the trunk, follow him across the street to the studio building.
Unlike the few practice spaces I've seen in Seattle, inevitably subterranean dungeons with lonely dangling lightbulbs barely illuming cracked walls adorned with stickers proclaiming the existence of long-doomed & -defunct bands, this place is perfectly clean and tidy. The floor is lustrous hardwood and the counters at the front desk are shining & spotless. Atsushi gets (rents?) a strap from the studio manager, and the three of us head down the hall to a practice room.
The room is immaculate, of course; more hardwood, two beautiful synths, a full drumset on a red circular rug, and a gloriously huge amp, at least four feet across. I plug the guitar into a distortion pedal, 1/4 M->F, feeling a little nervous. I get nervous when I play music with other people, mostly due to the infrequency of such occasions and the idiosyncratic style of my playing, but also because when I was 16 I had a singularly disastrous session of jamming with the band that would later become BAA, my first experience with a band ever, during which I played so poorly that six years later I heard Jeff (the drummer) was certain I still couldn't play guitar, despite having six years of practice hence. So it went, so it goes.
I strap on the guitar. Atsushi takes off his shoes and steps onto the rich red rug. I play a chord, he plays a a roll, and we dance for a little while, a bit clumsily, I step on my own feet; for some reason I can't remember any chords except ridiculously simple ones, a-F-C-E etc. Been a long time since I last held an electric guitar. Too long. I try to adapt some acoustic progressions, but they aren't working and I'm not sure what to do. Then Atsushi motions at me. "Metal?" he asks. "Play metal?"
I kind of laugh. Pause a moment. Metal? Then: Of course I can fucking play metal! Can't I? I downtune the E to a D and crank up the gain. And something changes, after four years of acoustic fingerstyle exclusivity a switch has been thrown and suddenly I'm back to blasting "Betty" out of my car speakers during shimmeringly sunny months in the sleepy suburbs, back to a time before my fx pedal was stolen out of our house back in 1909 Union (epoch no. 1), back to a time when I wanted a rock band but never had one, and I pick up a pick, light and easy in my fingers, and I hit an open D power chord. Hard.
Atsushi grins, he hits the drums. Hard. And in that clean, light room, we come together and jam and Atsushi's hot girlfriend is banging her head, dancing, throwing her long black hair, as we improvise song after song. I can hardly believe what my fingers are coming up with, sloppy and unpracticed but it's working, and I intuitively follow his drums into breakdowns and out of them again, he drops a drumstick, I drop my pick, neither of us care, we laugh and the amp rolls out a beautifully tonal blast of pure feedback. Atsushi deftly consults his cell phone translator. "I am very... very... happy."
An hour and a half later we have to go. The last bus back to Hojo Bus Center is scheduled for 8:30, which, in Japan, means it leaves at 8:29. I'm satisfyingly deafened and the guitar is comfortably heavy against my hip; I'm reluctant to remove it. But I do and we pack things up, neatly rolling up the cables, Atsushi's girlfriend helping, then we go back down to the lobby: held doors, arigato without gozaimasu, vending machine, more cyndrilical bottles of tea, conversation fragmentary but easy: England, Thailand, Japan, The United States, America.
From the window on our way back to the bus depot I see the lights of Osaka passing, all the colors and shapes of the night in this city blurring into a vision of the future, of electricity and synchronicity and the world exactly its size, which is, I feel this moment, my mind and fingers still charged with music, exactly right, perfectly sized, proportionate and golden to how much time we are allotted to spend here.
At Umeda I bid farewell to Atsushi's girlfriend, can't remember whether to say hajimemashite or yoroshiku so I say neither, but we share big smiles, we wave wordlessly, both understand: words are not necessary. Atsushi walks with me down to the ticket office.
I am going home before his next day off, flying back to Chicago, so another day next week is not possible. It's ok, so desu. Come back to Japan. You promise? We'll play again. Atsushi makes me promise and I do, and he even makes me pinky swear, right hand to left, turn it around, and I'm not sure whether I mean it or not, or even what it means if I do mean it, but I do swear, our fingers interlock. And then the bus, precisely and predictably on time, is boarding.
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December 14th, 2005
07:40 pm
What this city needs is a colossus in the harbor.
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December 9th, 2005
12:03 am - the end of midland jazz
On the way out I notice some dead roses in a vase and I can't help myself, I have to touch them. A single fragile petal spirals dustily down to the floor and I glance at the girl next to me, is she watching this? and she is and she sees me noticing and then we both start laughing because they must have planned it this way, for this to happen, it is too perfect.
Turn then and descend together from the third floor dungeon to the street where cars fly by a little cloister cluster of people smoking cigarettes next door to the hidden door down. I found the way downtown, but only after a while, there was a false start in the cross eye space across the way, where the kids play. It was the right address but the wrong street and a cellphonic doorman let me be without a beat and I went up to the second floor, looking for a third floor, but there wasn't one in the first place. Only a blank brick wall with no doorways, no windowways, a dimly lit deadend stairwell. No echoes either in that strangely silent space. Then I heard something behind me: I spun to see someone sneaking, not hiding, just creeping through the hall from side to side, a shadowy crablike figurine disappearing through a door I hadn't seen. That's about when I figured out that this place must be totally wrong so I turned right around and went back down.
Since then I recame to mind [like I knew then knew anew] what that place is, that blank brick box, and I understand completely why the dormant feeling of wrongness bubbled up in me to a steep peak that I stumbled over, leaving. And I did. I always do, sooner or later; better sooner.
It's cold and there are bundled people huddled doubled with cigarette eyes making shy conversations by the door. One looks out at me and I recognize him. A man with whom I withhold. When I came in upstairs earlier he was glowfaced, hooking up glintlit electronics, generously splicing technology like a lengthily loaded apology at his powwow table, preparing for the forthcoming show. Meanwhile writhing wires snaked down from the ceiling above an arrayed bay of folding metal chairs, vicious as though they might bite right through our necks if our heads began to sag down from boredom, tiredness, or just lack of movement - or lack of being moved, which, from how things turned out, is mostly what happened. Didn't happen. He was up there tinkering, electronicking, and this boy next to me was staring at him and occasionally squirming in his uncomfortable seat and then he was leaning in to me - later during intersettlar setup we would bond distantly, almost quantumly, when he would tell me incautiously about his chronic anxiety - but at this moment he was only whispering in my ear: "So this is life after grad school."
As we soon were to see, life after grad school apparently involves a measured joylessness in music that I cannot fathom, an erudite dry drabness, to supposedly be savored like red wine even as it parches your throat and leaves you sunk down in sleepy saline. For most of the show while the musicians were generating their refractions of lifeless abstractions I was either checking out the sweet little checkerfloor kitchen off to one side and wondering if there might be any beer in there or, more often, dreaming of places that were warm and comfortable, that were familiar [firesides, smiling asides] or that, in the very least, still nod the occasional drowsily reverent head to the possibility and power of familiarity.
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