Small in Japan

Baby and I just spent the week in Tokyo … in what remains of the Edo Period’s red light district … namely Yoshiwara … the true gutter of Tokyo … bums and madmen … rows of vending machines with men obsessively checking each returned-change pocket just in case … just in case … scavengers … all men … the only women there are beautiful … beautiful because they’re paid to be, or beautiful because they’ve survived … sitting at the end of the bar, the oldest one there, history stamped on her countenance. At night the men line the arcade, some drinking, some too drunk to keep drinking, some in eye glasses, moustaches, reading, like they just left a lecture hall, all lined up together with their cardboard and their blankets and awnings … they sleep early … why is that?
One night we went to the seediest bar we could find … it was just like my teens when I’d seek the lowest, most profound amongst us … it was just the same, but in Japanese … the emotion, the wild mood swings, the love and the violence … and the stink and the alcohol and the crescendo of insistence … in something … I couldn’t understand, but I knew the routine … we left as a fight was starting … same old story.
I loved that place, I’d like to stay a while ... all those humans.

Interlude

I saw a man on the street today playing electric guitar. He was wasted away, all muscle and bone, almost elderly, with a rock’n’roll hairstyle, singing Cantonese pop from the 60’s. His speakers were rigged to his bicycle, and he had a kind of shrine surrounding him of news articles and photos and a fluffy white pet resting on a stool with a sign in English and Chinese warning you not to touch the dog or it’ll bite.
Turns out it was Danny Hui, old rising star who was torn from fame by heroin abuse, now alive again and performing on a Mong Kok street, half circus act, half giant.
I gave him $10 then the rest of the crowd started dropping money into the various hats and buckets around him. It’s crowd mentality – very hard to be the first one when everyone is watching.
I can’t imagine the balls this man must have. It sounded great, amid all the empty noise and clutter on the street. Imagine, amid all those people … a human.

Diagnosis, murder

It’s Saturday morning, or more accurately, the end of Friday night. I’ve been with people. Generally I don’t spend a lot of time with people, I’m quite busy. This is the 2nd weekend in a row I’ve associated with people.
When you hang out with people you need to interact with them. This sometimes means putting up with their asininities, and sometimes, if they’re quite clever, means you get to intellectually pare with them. Tonight was a bit of both, but ended up, as any good human event should, with intoxication and dancing.
I like people, I really do. I just wish so many of them weren’t so hung up on themselves. Really, we’re here to fuck and have a good time. You can diagnose it as much as you like, but you’re going to come to the same conclusion: fuck … good time. Art … girls and boys. It’s really not that complicated.

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I believe my grandfather coined the title "Diagnosis, Murder" in his novel of the same name, under the pen name of "Sutherland Scott". A fine writer in my somewhat biased opinion.

Move on

So Israel just swapped Samir Kuntar, plus 4 other Lebanese prisoners, plus the remains of 199 Lebanese fighters for … the bodies of 2 dead Israeli soldiers.
I would usually laugh at the “persecute-them-before-they-persecute-us” circus that is the Middle East, but this whole thing is just a case of humanity gone straight out the window.
Sometimes I just wish everyone would kill each other and get it over with, I’m sick to death of all this petty god, possession, hatred idiocy.
I’ve seen a little of the Middle East, and I can tell you friends, they’re all just a bunch of people, just like me. Just as useless and pointless and beautiful as everyone else.
I know what it’s like to be pissed off and get in a fight, but I get over it.

I liked Ike

“I know regardless of what I've done, good and bad, it took it all to make me what I am today", Ike Turner

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I watched “A Streetcar Named Desire” on a plane recently. Even though I’ve seen it many times, it was still better than all the other movies available. Every time I encounter this play I progress a little bit. This time, for the first time, I felt pity for Blanche. Initially I was so taken by the beautiful, swaggering Stanley I had nothing but contempt for her. I never knew he raped her till I read the play. The first time I saw the movie after I read the play it seemed obvious, but this time I was again unsure if they actually implied this in the movie or not. Either way, what an amazing study of violence and the human condition. I’ve noticed recently that when I yell, I affect a Stanley Kowalski accent. I know it’s bad to romanticize such men, but when you’re surrounded by hollow people, it’s just so appealing to release yourself with abandon, regardless of what may or not be right or wrong.

A long, serious post (sorry)

Technomonk got me thinking. The “mental shift”, and the Buddhist idea that change comes from within. I grappled with this dilemma a while ago – the question of if we should actively try to change the world or not.
The idea was that if you try to instill your own truths on other people, then it is a similar thing as manipulating them, which has the same root as the corruption that has been fucking up the human race since the human race started (presumably everyone who campaigns their own truths believe them to be superior to everyone else's, and presumably all such people aren't going to be compatible, so most, or all, are going to be self-deceived).
The general Buddhist doctrine is that you shouldn’t try to change anything outside yourself, but should instead focus only on yourself, and as you proceed towards enlightenment, the world around you will follow. It may be slow and indirect, but it is the only untainted path, and the only one that can reach the true destination.
This makes perfect sense, but I always had a problem with it because it allows for entire generations to be fucked while the winds of change are gently being mustered. While I’m smiling at strangers and conserving electricity some cunt is making a quick buck at the expense of someone who doesn’t know better. This cunt will live a prosperous life and by the time the meek have inherited the earth he’ll be long dead and giggling uncontrollably in hell.
Case in point: US Vice President Dick Cheney. Even if he died a torturous death tonight, I think the life-long rewards would outweigh one uncomfortable evening facing the consequences of his corrupt existence.
I was chatting to a guy once. He was chatting about how he’d lived his childhood being sexually abused by his father, then he’d lived his young adulthood with this all blocked from his mind, then how he’d faced it and how it had torn his soul from himself, and I always remember how he said it wasn’t worth it; how he wished he’d lived his whole life in ignorance, because it was an insurmountable hell to face it. Anyway, I was unusually sober and lucid during the conversation, and he was provocatively articulate and profound, so I asked him about the above dilemma, and he said, “We are all involved”.
His point was, you can’t be inactive. Whether you like it or not, you are part of the runaway train that is humanity, and to have beliefs is not enough. If you sit back and let things happen then you are tantamount to condoning them, and to imagine that you are somehow exempt from contributing is just a façade of weakness and disinterest and subjection.
I don’t see any difference between Mother Theresa and Hitler. They both had Nietzsche’s “will to power”.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: everyone should be just like me. I should be King, and if you disagree I will have you lined up and shot.
No, wait, fuck, I almost had the answer, but I fucked it up again…

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This is a lithograph of Ekaterina Maximova, pupil of Galina Ulanova. After I made this, I didn’t care if I never made another lithograph, I loved it so much.