Mantra of the Day
Today's mantra comes courtesy of Brooklyn-based rapper Fabolous:
"I'm on the parkway, see me at the Knick game
Probably seen this tatted on your chick frame:
F-A-B-O-L-O-U-S."
Fabolous is saying here that he is a player of such incomprehensible magnitude that your girlfriend, and in fact all men's girlfriends everywhere, have tattooed his name somewhere on their bodies.
Your directions: repeat mantra throughout practice, and for the rest of day. For is this not god inscribing god's name on the flesh of god, all for the delight of god?
Perhaps it's just a hook from a catchy song.
Next week's mantra will come courtesy of Queensbridge rapper Jadakiss.
Extreme Decisions of a Biblical Magnitude
The new Final Fantasy video game was released to shitloads of fanfare on the sixteenth here in Tokyo, the culmination of weeks of promotional hype. There have been mega-story billboards on buildings througout the city, posters wheatpasted on every building, and the giant jumbotron building monitors have been running commercials non-stop. On weekends, the exits of the major subways were patrolled by scantily clad girls dressed as characters from the game.
The only way to top the last bit would be if the heavens opened and comic books fell from the sky. But anyway, at 6:30 in the morning of the release day, I trucked past the Shibuya Tsutaya to see 50 people lined up and waiting to purchase the game. My nerd heart swelled with emotion.
I love this country's overwelming love and support of all things nerd-related, and when a role-playing videogame is accorded the pomp and circumstance of a major cultural event, it brings tears to a grown nerd's eyes. There are now Final Fantasy point-of-purchase displays at the front counter of every 7-11. The staples: Milk, bread, rice-balls ... and Final Fantasy.
Which brings me to my current and related dilemma, on par with Abraham's from the Old Testament: I have to choose between attending a Chuck and Maty workshop this coming weekend ... or the Tokyo International Anime Fair.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Cell Phones
They’re everywhere in Tokyo, no shit. Yoga students tuck ‘em under their mats and check for text messages during practice.
That Crazy Bastard Katsu
My buddy Katsu, he of double-practice hamburger-flipping fame, is trying to out-zealot me! The crazy bastard! He connived a key to the studio and I arrived at 4:30 this morning to find he’d already started his practice! (Presumably his first.) I’ll show him who’s crazier …
Tokyo Defamiliarization
I walk or bike everywhere in Tokyo and live at the top of a fourth-floor walk-up. What’s a lazy man to do? I keep cashing out my calorie bank account, and consequently I’m so hungry at all times of the day that, if pressed, I could devour my own foot. (I've thought a lot about it: the left one goes first.) I cannot stop eating.
I walked by a Subway sandwich store the other day and ducked inside to hork down some carbohydrates. Ah, the generic familiarity of the global chain stores! One is always automatically oriented to the colors, the menu, and the layout.
Tokyo Subways are the same as the ones in the U.S.---the wallpaper features nineteenth-century newspaper headlines and subway blueprints, the palette is the reassuring yellow and green, and the employees stand behind the same glassed-off sandwich assembly line.
Fabolous’ “You Can’t Deny It,” featuring Nate Dogg, bumps from the overhead speakers, volume at eight. The Japanese woman behind the counter, resplendent in her Subway uniform and visor, inquires about the bread I desire for my 8cm carb-laden treat.
I am about to answer when Fabolous interrupts to say, “And if you duck cheese I'ma fuck her---duck these, motherfucker! Ghetto fabulous nigga, I ride 'til I die!”
I am stunned into immobility. Apparently big corpo chains don’t require radio edits! I recover my composure enough to ask for wheat. The Subway woman and I slide down the counter, and she asks me in open-faced earnestness which vegetables I want. Nate Dogg pipes in from the speakers: “Y’all can’t deny it, I’m a fuckin’ rider---you don’t wanna fuck with me!”
My mission is now to pay for my sandwich with a straight face.
It is difficult.
Fabolous hijacks the familiar in Tokyo! What’s the word? “Ostranenie:” to make the familiar strange. The Russian Formalists, the Situationists, Fabolous, and maybe even Brecht would be doing cartwheels.
I wolfed my Veggie Delite, head bobbing. Fabolous says, “Still don't know me, still jump in a Lex---the chain so icy I got chill bumps on my neck!”
Speaking of Bumping
The girl behind the counter at the corporate yoga studio bumped Enya at volume 10 this morning, doubtless because Enya is on the corporate “Approved Music for Yoga Studios” list. I force her to swab my vomit from the hardwood floor. “There’s a good lass,” I tell her. “You couldn’t have known.” There's nothing worse than Enya, except maybe Enya and power crystals and pewter dragons.
... And Just to Keep it Chemical!
On the heels of the popular phencyclidine posts comes another must-read!
Unfortunately I cannot lay claim to genuine experiential participation in the following event, given my hatred of cigarettes, which seems to be genetically encoded. In addition to dipping their coffin nails in liquid phencyclidine, John and a few homies used to dip 'em in Wite-Out. You know, Liquid Paper?
There was another cross-town crew who reputedly dipped theirs in embalming fluid, but that might've been rumor. Where the fuck does one get embalming fluid? Then again, where does one lay hands on liquid PCP?
I wasn't on-hand the day Eddie flopped over and had a seizure as a result of smoking the Wite-Out-coated cigarette, but I did see him after he'd recovered. One side of his face was paralyzed and looked like lumpy clay: the left side of his mouth drooped and leaked drool and his left eyelid sagged closed. Eddie had to worry about the eyeball drying out because he couldn't blink.
They’re everywhere in Tokyo, no shit. Yoga students tuck ‘em under their mats and check for text messages during practice.
That Crazy Bastard Katsu
My buddy Katsu, he of double-practice hamburger-flipping fame, is trying to out-zealot me! The crazy bastard! He connived a key to the studio and I arrived at 4:30 this morning to find he’d already started his practice! (Presumably his first.) I’ll show him who’s crazier …
Tokyo Defamiliarization
I walk or bike everywhere in Tokyo and live at the top of a fourth-floor walk-up. What’s a lazy man to do? I keep cashing out my calorie bank account, and consequently I’m so hungry at all times of the day that, if pressed, I could devour my own foot. (I've thought a lot about it: the left one goes first.) I cannot stop eating.
I walked by a Subway sandwich store the other day and ducked inside to hork down some carbohydrates. Ah, the generic familiarity of the global chain stores! One is always automatically oriented to the colors, the menu, and the layout.
Tokyo Subways are the same as the ones in the U.S.---the wallpaper features nineteenth-century newspaper headlines and subway blueprints, the palette is the reassuring yellow and green, and the employees stand behind the same glassed-off sandwich assembly line.
Fabolous’ “You Can’t Deny It,” featuring Nate Dogg, bumps from the overhead speakers, volume at eight. The Japanese woman behind the counter, resplendent in her Subway uniform and visor, inquires about the bread I desire for my 8cm carb-laden treat.
I am about to answer when Fabolous interrupts to say, “And if you duck cheese I'ma fuck her---duck these, motherfucker! Ghetto fabulous nigga, I ride 'til I die!”
I am stunned into immobility. Apparently big corpo chains don’t require radio edits! I recover my composure enough to ask for wheat. The Subway woman and I slide down the counter, and she asks me in open-faced earnestness which vegetables I want. Nate Dogg pipes in from the speakers: “Y’all can’t deny it, I’m a fuckin’ rider---you don’t wanna fuck with me!”
My mission is now to pay for my sandwich with a straight face.
It is difficult.
Fabolous hijacks the familiar in Tokyo! What’s the word? “Ostranenie:” to make the familiar strange. The Russian Formalists, the Situationists, Fabolous, and maybe even Brecht would be doing cartwheels.
I wolfed my Veggie Delite, head bobbing. Fabolous says, “Still don't know me, still jump in a Lex---the chain so icy I got chill bumps on my neck!”
Speaking of Bumping
The girl behind the counter at the corporate yoga studio bumped Enya at volume 10 this morning, doubtless because Enya is on the corporate “Approved Music for Yoga Studios” list. I force her to swab my vomit from the hardwood floor. “There’s a good lass,” I tell her. “You couldn’t have known.” There's nothing worse than Enya, except maybe Enya and power crystals and pewter dragons.
... And Just to Keep it Chemical!
On the heels of the popular phencyclidine posts comes another must-read!
Unfortunately I cannot lay claim to genuine experiential participation in the following event, given my hatred of cigarettes, which seems to be genetically encoded. In addition to dipping their coffin nails in liquid phencyclidine, John and a few homies used to dip 'em in Wite-Out. You know, Liquid Paper?
There was another cross-town crew who reputedly dipped theirs in embalming fluid, but that might've been rumor. Where the fuck does one get embalming fluid? Then again, where does one lay hands on liquid PCP?
I wasn't on-hand the day Eddie flopped over and had a seizure as a result of smoking the Wite-Out-coated cigarette, but I did see him after he'd recovered. One side of his face was paralyzed and looked like lumpy clay: the left side of his mouth drooped and leaked drool and his left eyelid sagged closed. Eddie had to worry about the eyeball drying out because he couldn't blink.
Friday, March 10, 2006
Ah, Phencyclidine
My buddy John had an unspecified number of older brothers, unspecified because they were on steady rotation in and out of jail. They were all in some East Coast biker gang. John's refrigerator at home had one entire shelf stacked with Elmer's glue jars, the kind with the glue-brush stuck on the inside of the top. The glue jars were filled with liquid phencyclidine. We used to take parsley, dip it in the jars, wrap it in tin-foil to soak, then smoke it, releasing a very singular chemical-laced parsley smell.
Once, one of John's brothers was due to be released, so John and his other brothers packed a car and picked him up from jail for a celebratory fishing trip. How many jars of Elmer's were in the car? Who knows, but I'd guess a lot, because as they sped down the freeway, the brother fresh from lock-up opened the car door and stepped out for some fresh air.
He went to the hospital and then straight back to the clink, released Friday and back on Monday. John laughed when he told me the story, like, "Hey, what the fuck? He's a dumbfuck. Shit happens." John was pretty fucked up.
Profanity-laced Phrases That Have No Japanese Equivalent When Shouted In Moving Traffic From A Speeding Bicycle
1. "Loogout homie."
2. "Watch it there, tubby."
3. "Stay in your lane, fuckface."
4. "Gah!
5. "Your left, your left, your left! Your left! Shit."
6. "Hey there chief."
7. "Oops."
8. "Whoops."
9. "Fucktard!"
10. "I am sure your BMW is not scratched."
Katsu
In broken English, Katsu tells me he quit his job as a graphic designer in order to practice ashtanga. He wanted a job that freed up his mornings so he could practice ashtanga. He now "makes hamburgers" from 10 to 10 everyday. That is to say, he works a 10-hour shift at a fast-food restaurant.
He also practices twice a day. I asked him if he was trying to get "there" twice as fast, but he didn't understand me.
We've become friends as Katsu is the first human I see every morning. He arrives at the studio to begin his first practice just when I'm finishing at around 6 a.m. He hasn't abandoned graphic design, however---he has just designed some banging shirts for my friend Chama's studio, tokyo-yoga.com.
Books
"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius"
"Freakonomics"
"Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman
"60 Stories" by Donald Barthelme
"Kundalini: Aghori II" by Bobby Svoboda
"The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe
The number-one Tokyo banger, however, has been "Who Cares?!" by Ramesh Balsekar
Cartoons, Or, Why I Loved Bittorrent Until Our ISP Choked Our Service
Dragon Ball Z
Yu Yu Hakusho
Hellsing
Gundam: War in the Pocket
Gundam: Starlight Express
My buddy John had an unspecified number of older brothers, unspecified because they were on steady rotation in and out of jail. They were all in some East Coast biker gang. John's refrigerator at home had one entire shelf stacked with Elmer's glue jars, the kind with the glue-brush stuck on the inside of the top. The glue jars were filled with liquid phencyclidine. We used to take parsley, dip it in the jars, wrap it in tin-foil to soak, then smoke it, releasing a very singular chemical-laced parsley smell.
Once, one of John's brothers was due to be released, so John and his other brothers packed a car and picked him up from jail for a celebratory fishing trip. How many jars of Elmer's were in the car? Who knows, but I'd guess a lot, because as they sped down the freeway, the brother fresh from lock-up opened the car door and stepped out for some fresh air.
He went to the hospital and then straight back to the clink, released Friday and back on Monday. John laughed when he told me the story, like, "Hey, what the fuck? He's a dumbfuck. Shit happens." John was pretty fucked up.
Profanity-laced Phrases That Have No Japanese Equivalent When Shouted In Moving Traffic From A Speeding Bicycle
1. "Loogout homie."
2. "Watch it there, tubby."
3. "Stay in your lane, fuckface."
4. "Gah!
5. "Your left, your left, your left! Your left! Shit."
6. "Hey there chief."
7. "Oops."
8. "Whoops."
9. "Fucktard!"
10. "I am sure your BMW is not scratched."
Katsu
In broken English, Katsu tells me he quit his job as a graphic designer in order to practice ashtanga. He wanted a job that freed up his mornings so he could practice ashtanga. He now "makes hamburgers" from 10 to 10 everyday. That is to say, he works a 10-hour shift at a fast-food restaurant.
He also practices twice a day. I asked him if he was trying to get "there" twice as fast, but he didn't understand me.
We've become friends as Katsu is the first human I see every morning. He arrives at the studio to begin his first practice just when I'm finishing at around 6 a.m. He hasn't abandoned graphic design, however---he has just designed some banging shirts for my friend Chama's studio, tokyo-yoga.com.
Books
"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius"
"Freakonomics"
"Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman
"60 Stories" by Donald Barthelme
"Kundalini: Aghori II" by Bobby Svoboda
"The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe
The number-one Tokyo banger, however, has been "Who Cares?!" by Ramesh Balsekar
Cartoons, Or, Why I Loved Bittorrent Until Our ISP Choked Our Service
Dragon Ball Z
Yu Yu Hakusho
Hellsing
Gundam: War in the Pocket
Gundam: Starlight Express
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Post-it Note Stuck to Cerebellum
Pee first, then the Tiger Balm.
Extra-wide Sharpie Tattoo on Back of Hand
(For Walking Around Tokyo)
Buy Nothing
The Best Part of Cappucino
The sludge cloud at the bottom of the cup, cut with espresso and sugar.
The Ol’ Truck Door in the Face Trick
A classic! I bike with the flow of traffic. Sometimes passengers get out of trucks stopped at traffic lights. I caught the door right in the face! Actually, I took most of it on the shoulder. Surprised hell out of the guy climbing out, too.
Chilling with Yakuza in the Sento
There’re just three of us, and we sit and sweat in the wood-walled steam room. A speaker on the ceiling pipes in the Muzak version of Van Morrison’s “Moondance” and comes very close to killing my soul.
The old yakuza guy on my left has the full-body tattoo hook-up. Arms, shoulders, back, thighs---his body is fully covered in tattoos but for a vertical stretch on his chest. All his skin is covered but for the parts that would be revealed when he wears a kimono. He smiles a genial grandfather smile and nods at me, then cracks open a manga comic about yakuza.
The younger kid now sitting on my right is the older man’s underling. He held the door open for the guy and waited a full respectful minute before entering the steam room. He’s since sprinted out twice with comic over-enthusiasm for the older man’s ringing cell phone. Comic because we’re all buck-ass naked, and there’s nothing funnier than a buck-ass naked man attempting to sprint on a wet tile floor with his dick flapping.
He’s got the beginnings of what will be the full-body tattoo hook-up, and he’s shooting sideways glances at the ink on my arm. It’s enough that I baldly stare back at him---man, I fucking hate being stared at like I’m not there, especially when I’m sitting six inches away from someone and we’re both naked.
I smile and point at his tattoos and say, “Nice.” He smiles and points at mine and says, “Very good!” We give each other the thumbs-up---two buck-ass naked guys giving each the thumbs-up and grinning like idiots. It’s not as comic as watching Junior hop around the corner at high speed on a wet floor. But it’s close.
Rice Ball Roulette
I’m not just subsisting on muesli and bananas---I’m also eating a shit-ton of hockey puck-shaped rice balls from the local Sunkus, AM/PMs, and 7-11s. Generally, I’m fairly sure what I’m getting---I prefer the sesame seed and red-bean rice ball---but when that’s not available ... spin the wheel, try your luck.
Lessons in Tokyo iPod Detournement
Directions: wander until lost. Set iPod on stun. Create dream-state meaning. Strip personal biography from the city; hijack Tokyo’s geography and history. Become an alien, make the city a strange and wondrous lunar landscape.
Round One: Leonard Cohen Versus Tokyo
“Famous Blue Raincoat” on the Metro; body pushed and pulled by the tidal wash of the crowds and the ebb and flow of the train; an ocean of humanity; “Did you ever go clear?”
Round Two: Krishna Das Versus Shibuya
4 a.m. bike ride to studio; Krishna Das’ bass-chord voice, perfectly struck, thrumming “Puja”; masked, helmeted, vinyl-suited astronaut construction worker waves me to practice with his twin orange flashlights; cold, cold, empty studio, don’t think, just do.
Round Three: Metallica Versus Akihabara
“Back to the Front”; jaw-clenching phencyclidine disconnection; “You will die/ When I say/ You will die”; technology in all its shapes and sizes; flickering, strobing, pulsing; raw wash of too much, too much.
Pee first, then the Tiger Balm.
Extra-wide Sharpie Tattoo on Back of Hand
(For Walking Around Tokyo)
Buy Nothing
The Best Part of Cappucino
The sludge cloud at the bottom of the cup, cut with espresso and sugar.
The Ol’ Truck Door in the Face Trick
A classic! I bike with the flow of traffic. Sometimes passengers get out of trucks stopped at traffic lights. I caught the door right in the face! Actually, I took most of it on the shoulder. Surprised hell out of the guy climbing out, too.
Chilling with Yakuza in the Sento
There’re just three of us, and we sit and sweat in the wood-walled steam room. A speaker on the ceiling pipes in the Muzak version of Van Morrison’s “Moondance” and comes very close to killing my soul.
The old yakuza guy on my left has the full-body tattoo hook-up. Arms, shoulders, back, thighs---his body is fully covered in tattoos but for a vertical stretch on his chest. All his skin is covered but for the parts that would be revealed when he wears a kimono. He smiles a genial grandfather smile and nods at me, then cracks open a manga comic about yakuza.
The younger kid now sitting on my right is the older man’s underling. He held the door open for the guy and waited a full respectful minute before entering the steam room. He’s since sprinted out twice with comic over-enthusiasm for the older man’s ringing cell phone. Comic because we’re all buck-ass naked, and there’s nothing funnier than a buck-ass naked man attempting to sprint on a wet tile floor with his dick flapping.
He’s got the beginnings of what will be the full-body tattoo hook-up, and he’s shooting sideways glances at the ink on my arm. It’s enough that I baldly stare back at him---man, I fucking hate being stared at like I’m not there, especially when I’m sitting six inches away from someone and we’re both naked.
I smile and point at his tattoos and say, “Nice.” He smiles and points at mine and says, “Very good!” We give each other the thumbs-up---two buck-ass naked guys giving each the thumbs-up and grinning like idiots. It’s not as comic as watching Junior hop around the corner at high speed on a wet floor. But it’s close.
Rice Ball Roulette
I’m not just subsisting on muesli and bananas---I’m also eating a shit-ton of hockey puck-shaped rice balls from the local Sunkus, AM/PMs, and 7-11s. Generally, I’m fairly sure what I’m getting---I prefer the sesame seed and red-bean rice ball---but when that’s not available ... spin the wheel, try your luck.
Lessons in Tokyo iPod Detournement
Directions: wander until lost. Set iPod on stun. Create dream-state meaning. Strip personal biography from the city; hijack Tokyo’s geography and history. Become an alien, make the city a strange and wondrous lunar landscape.
Round One: Leonard Cohen Versus Tokyo
“Famous Blue Raincoat” on the Metro; body pushed and pulled by the tidal wash of the crowds and the ebb and flow of the train; an ocean of humanity; “Did you ever go clear?”
Round Two: Krishna Das Versus Shibuya
4 a.m. bike ride to studio; Krishna Das’ bass-chord voice, perfectly struck, thrumming “Puja”; masked, helmeted, vinyl-suited astronaut construction worker waves me to practice with his twin orange flashlights; cold, cold, empty studio, don’t think, just do.
Round Three: Metallica Versus Akihabara
“Back to the Front”; jaw-clenching phencyclidine disconnection; “You will die/ When I say/ You will die”; technology in all its shapes and sizes; flickering, strobing, pulsing; raw wash of too much, too much.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Ask Cereal Boy
Once again, Cereal Boy is here to answer your cereal- and yoga-related questions.
Dear Cereal Boy,
Is muesli considered cereal, and do you eat it?
Joseph Pasquale
Ramona, CA
Joseph,
Since muesli consists of uncooked rolled oats and fruit, it is frightfully less sugary than cereal, and therefore not as good for you as regular cereal. I blame the sawdust palates of the Swiss, who invented the stuff in 1900. Muesli is, however, part of the cereal food group. It meets all the vital criteria: it is packaged in bags or boxes, is prepared with milk in a bowl, and as Jerry Seinfeld famously noted, it can be eaten with one hand, while one is doing something else. Therefore I eat the shit out of it.
Dear Cereal Boy,
Does your well-known hatred of hippies extend to granola?
Franklin Rochester
Dubuque, IA
Franklin,
My hatred of hippies extends to many of their accoutrements---Birkenstocks, hackie sacks, patchouli, alpaca wool, folk singers---but stops short of granola. Granola, which consists of a baked concoction of fruit, rolled oats, nuts and honey, became part of the cereal food group in the mid-1800s---well before the hippie co-opted it so famously at Woodstock. I do, however, consider it one of last century's great tragedies that such a glorious breakfast treat has become a slang term for those unshaven sandal-shod cretins.
Dear Cereal Boy,
Is it true you subsist solely on cereal?
Anne-Marie Plodnitz
Redford, MA
No. I pour milk on the cereal. I also consume coffee, dark chocolate, and bananas by the branch-load.
Dear Cereal Boy,
Will cereal help my yoga practice?
Sean Fillmore
Vestal, VA
Fuck yes.
Dear Cereal Boy,
In your column in last month's Light Connection, you quoted a passage from the Shiva Samhita, a 17th century yogic text, as listing the many-fold benefits of cereal consumption. I've re-read the text, and I can't find any reference to cereal. I also couldn't find any reference to espresso as "the blood of the gods." What gives?
Lisa Woodrow, DDS
Blaine, VA
You are obviously reading an outdated and culturally myopic translation. I suggest you find a better one.
Once again, Cereal Boy is here to answer your cereal- and yoga-related questions.
Dear Cereal Boy,
Is muesli considered cereal, and do you eat it?
Joseph Pasquale
Ramona, CA
Joseph,
Since muesli consists of uncooked rolled oats and fruit, it is frightfully less sugary than cereal, and therefore not as good for you as regular cereal. I blame the sawdust palates of the Swiss, who invented the stuff in 1900. Muesli is, however, part of the cereal food group. It meets all the vital criteria: it is packaged in bags or boxes, is prepared with milk in a bowl, and as Jerry Seinfeld famously noted, it can be eaten with one hand, while one is doing something else. Therefore I eat the shit out of it.
Dear Cereal Boy,
Does your well-known hatred of hippies extend to granola?
Franklin Rochester
Dubuque, IA
Franklin,
My hatred of hippies extends to many of their accoutrements---Birkenstocks, hackie sacks, patchouli, alpaca wool, folk singers---but stops short of granola. Granola, which consists of a baked concoction of fruit, rolled oats, nuts and honey, became part of the cereal food group in the mid-1800s---well before the hippie co-opted it so famously at Woodstock. I do, however, consider it one of last century's great tragedies that such a glorious breakfast treat has become a slang term for those unshaven sandal-shod cretins.
Dear Cereal Boy,
Is it true you subsist solely on cereal?
Anne-Marie Plodnitz
Redford, MA
No. I pour milk on the cereal. I also consume coffee, dark chocolate, and bananas by the branch-load.
Dear Cereal Boy,
Will cereal help my yoga practice?
Sean Fillmore
Vestal, VA
Fuck yes.
Dear Cereal Boy,
In your column in last month's Light Connection, you quoted a passage from the Shiva Samhita, a 17th century yogic text, as listing the many-fold benefits of cereal consumption. I've re-read the text, and I can't find any reference to cereal. I also couldn't find any reference to espresso as "the blood of the gods." What gives?
Lisa Woodrow, DDS
Blaine, VA
You are obviously reading an outdated and culturally myopic translation. I suggest you find a better one.
Thursday, February 2, 2006
Tokyo, city of narcoleptics: Trains shuttle to and fro, every third or fifth person slack-jawed and unconscious, either slumped over on their seat or suspended on their feet by fellow passengers and force of habit. Chin-chested hunchbacks have taken over the corner seats in coffee shops. The coffee remains untouched until waking.
Yesterday on the train, the woman next to me slumped over onto my shoulder. Four women sat across from our unlikely coupling. Three of them nodded out during the ride, heads all bowed in the same direction and gently rocking in time with the train’s rhythms.
Mind you, this is mid-day, not early morning or late night.
Tokyo is a raw rush of the most intense stimulus on the planet---visual, auditory, sensory. Its inhabitants work ungodly hours, say 10 or 11 in the morning to 10 at night. Their long work days are often book-ended by hour-and-a-half commutes.
When they don’t work, they play. The karaoke houses are 10-story neon citadels. My daily 4:30 a.m. bike ride to yoga takes me past a karaoke center, and every morning, without fail, I pass drunk clusters of people emerging and heading home … doubtless to catch an hour or two of sleep before heading back to work.
The city seems in the grips of a sleeping sickness epidemic, a story from Calvino: People fall asleep in greater and greater numbers, on the trains and in the coffee shops, to be sure, but also in cars and in supermarkets, at their desks and on street corners, in plazas and skyscraper elevators, in parks and building foyers, until one is stepping over gently snoring bodies as one walks down the sidewalk. The three-story video displays, flashing neon signs and lambent window displays go unseen and unheard, their messages blinking and echoing down silent streets. One navigates once-busy train stations on tiptoes, careful not to wake those slumbering. The city’s ever-present background noise, its dull din, becomes the drone of millions of people, gently snoring.
Tokyo Yoga
Tokyo is the same as anywhere else. People struggle to fit a practice into their daily lives, juggling jobs, families, commutes, traffic, and winter weather. The yoga explosion in Japan, specifically the ashtanga explosion, mirrored its counterpart in the west, and there are many yoga students. They are passionate, driven, and hungry for information; in typical Japanese fashion, they adopted and adapted at hyper-speed.
There is a glut of yoga teachers, too, many foreigners here as well as budding Japanese teachers who have come to the yoga in the last two or three years. Smelling the money, corporations stepped in and sewed their dollars like dragon-teeth, from which have sprouted across Japan fully formed and ultra-modern yoga studio franchises.
Rents are hideous in Tokyo, so studio maximize all hours of the day. Yoga teachers are on the grind as they are in every big city, many traveling to different yoga studios throughout the day in order to teach two or three people. My flatmate Chama owns and runs his own studio. For a while, he was teaching 25 classes a week. He’s since cut back to 15. His studio opens its doors at 6:30 a.m. and has classes throughout the entire day, sometimes until 10:30 at night. I usually only see Chama in the mid-afternoon when he stops by the flat to eat a bowl of noodles. He then passes out until it’s time to teach the evening’s class.
It would be more unsettling---"the yoga trend," like all trends or fads, will end---if ashtanga weren't so difficult to undertake and so powerful in its results. It will never be too popular because it's simply too fucking hard. It doesn't rely on star teachers to encourage the opening of one's heart chakra. Its effects are immediate and bone-deep; you just have to do it.
Yesterday on the train, the woman next to me slumped over onto my shoulder. Four women sat across from our unlikely coupling. Three of them nodded out during the ride, heads all bowed in the same direction and gently rocking in time with the train’s rhythms.
Mind you, this is mid-day, not early morning or late night.
Tokyo is a raw rush of the most intense stimulus on the planet---visual, auditory, sensory. Its inhabitants work ungodly hours, say 10 or 11 in the morning to 10 at night. Their long work days are often book-ended by hour-and-a-half commutes.
When they don’t work, they play. The karaoke houses are 10-story neon citadels. My daily 4:30 a.m. bike ride to yoga takes me past a karaoke center, and every morning, without fail, I pass drunk clusters of people emerging and heading home … doubtless to catch an hour or two of sleep before heading back to work.
The city seems in the grips of a sleeping sickness epidemic, a story from Calvino: People fall asleep in greater and greater numbers, on the trains and in the coffee shops, to be sure, but also in cars and in supermarkets, at their desks and on street corners, in plazas and skyscraper elevators, in parks and building foyers, until one is stepping over gently snoring bodies as one walks down the sidewalk. The three-story video displays, flashing neon signs and lambent window displays go unseen and unheard, their messages blinking and echoing down silent streets. One navigates once-busy train stations on tiptoes, careful not to wake those slumbering. The city’s ever-present background noise, its dull din, becomes the drone of millions of people, gently snoring.
Tokyo Yoga
Tokyo is the same as anywhere else. People struggle to fit a practice into their daily lives, juggling jobs, families, commutes, traffic, and winter weather. The yoga explosion in Japan, specifically the ashtanga explosion, mirrored its counterpart in the west, and there are many yoga students. They are passionate, driven, and hungry for information; in typical Japanese fashion, they adopted and adapted at hyper-speed.
There is a glut of yoga teachers, too, many foreigners here as well as budding Japanese teachers who have come to the yoga in the last two or three years. Smelling the money, corporations stepped in and sewed their dollars like dragon-teeth, from which have sprouted across Japan fully formed and ultra-modern yoga studio franchises.
Rents are hideous in Tokyo, so studio maximize all hours of the day. Yoga teachers are on the grind as they are in every big city, many traveling to different yoga studios throughout the day in order to teach two or three people. My flatmate Chama owns and runs his own studio. For a while, he was teaching 25 classes a week. He’s since cut back to 15. His studio opens its doors at 6:30 a.m. and has classes throughout the entire day, sometimes until 10:30 at night. I usually only see Chama in the mid-afternoon when he stops by the flat to eat a bowl of noodles. He then passes out until it’s time to teach the evening’s class.
It would be more unsettling---"the yoga trend," like all trends or fads, will end---if ashtanga weren't so difficult to undertake and so powerful in its results. It will never be too popular because it's simply too fucking hard. It doesn't rely on star teachers to encourage the opening of one's heart chakra. Its effects are immediate and bone-deep; you just have to do it.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
The Future is Now
One
Our washing machine washes, rinses, spins and dries clothes---all in one. You put the clothes in, push a button, and return two hours later to a load of clean, dry clothes.
Two
Our microwave is also a toaster---you pull off the revolving plate and a grill is underneath. There's a toast button on the front.
Three
Kranti bought the most futuristic cell phone in the world for ¥1. It's a Star Trek tricorder that takes photos and videos, recieves and sends e-mails, browses the Web, and makes excellent wet cappucinos. You can also swipe the phone on the electric sensors at subway turnstiles to ride the train. You can swipe it on many vending machines, which, in Tokyo, contain soda, juices, water, coffee, sandwiches, beer, mixed drinks, cigarettes, cigars, school-girl underpants, et cetera et cetera. There are a growing number of restaurants where you can swipe your phone to pay the bill.
Other
Every day, yoga studios in Tokyo provide fresh wet-wipes to students, with which they wipe down their mats.
Public Bath Blues
I am denied entry to a public bath due to my tattoos; a sign in front of the building features an "x" over an icon of a man covered in dragon tattoos. I try to explain to the employees that I am not yakuza, but to no avail.
Recipe for Coma
Ingredients
1. Wake at 3 a.m. to practice yoga at 4.
2. Stay awake all day.
3. That evening, swallow 1,000mgs of Robaxin (generic name: Methocarbamol).
4. Follow that with two hours in a Japanese bath. "Bath" includes sauna, hot tub, ice dip, and steam room. (Note: "hot" tub more accurately called "core of the fucking sun" tub.)
5. After bath, drink half of one shot-glass-sized hot sake.
Directions:
Slide off the restaurant booth into a puddle on the floor, unable to move your limbs. Blink "SOS" in Morse code to alert friends that you are in fact a sentient puddle of water, and that you need to be levered into a taxi with your home address pinned to your lapel.
Drukqs
Psilocybin mushrooms were legal in Japan until three years ago; head shops used to sell baggies of them. In contrast, marijuana is very illegal. People are brought up on criminal charges for failing urine tests.
DMT is still legal and available; I have not inquired about ketamine.
The GG Allin Challenge
Consumer culture has reached its apogee in Tokyo. Fashion has been deconstructed down to the molecular level and codified accordingly; fashion is followed with a rigor and zeal that, as William Gibson says in Pattern Recognition, has become an act of worship.
All of which has pushed me to the other and no less extreme end of the spectrum, the GG Allin Challenge, or the Scum Fuck Possession Fast, which involves giving up material possessions and only living with whatever fits in a brown paper bag.
GG Allin, as I'm sure everyone is aware, was a punk-rock car accident, a perpetual man on fire who wrote classic songs like "Drink, Fight and Fuck," and who hurled obscenities, fists, excrement, and other bodily effluvia on audience members. He swore he was going to kill himself on stage, but overdosed and died before he could make good.
GG had a simple philosophy on life. He had the jacket on his back and could fit everything else he owned in a brown paper bag, in case he needed to blow town, which he often did. The brown paper bag also presumably contained a six-pack and a carton of cigs.
Proposal: 10-day fast with only access to the clothing and toiletries that one is wearing and and one can fit in one regulation-sized brown paper shopping bag. No layering of clothes like girls who cheat at spin the bottle, and no department store bags! (Those are considered sacks.)
Things that are not considered "clothing" and "toiletries," and are as such outside of the fast: books, music, comic books.
You can't use your credit card, either. It's all cash-on-hand. So withdraw some money and live on a budget. You think fucking GG Allin, who wrote an album called Live Fast, Die Fast, had a fucking credit card, college boy? Fuck no.
Ten days? Make it a month.
You could do this no problem in India ... Tokyo, however, as with most places in the West: much harder---not least because it's freezing in Japan right now and you'd fill up the bag with just one sweater.
Okay, so we make it a seasonal fast---spring and summer only.
Which lets me off the hook ... for now.
One
Our washing machine washes, rinses, spins and dries clothes---all in one. You put the clothes in, push a button, and return two hours later to a load of clean, dry clothes.
Two
Our microwave is also a toaster---you pull off the revolving plate and a grill is underneath. There's a toast button on the front.
Three
Kranti bought the most futuristic cell phone in the world for ¥1. It's a Star Trek tricorder that takes photos and videos, recieves and sends e-mails, browses the Web, and makes excellent wet cappucinos. You can also swipe the phone on the electric sensors at subway turnstiles to ride the train. You can swipe it on many vending machines, which, in Tokyo, contain soda, juices, water, coffee, sandwiches, beer, mixed drinks, cigarettes, cigars, school-girl underpants, et cetera et cetera. There are a growing number of restaurants where you can swipe your phone to pay the bill.
Other
Every day, yoga studios in Tokyo provide fresh wet-wipes to students, with which they wipe down their mats.
Public Bath Blues
I am denied entry to a public bath due to my tattoos; a sign in front of the building features an "x" over an icon of a man covered in dragon tattoos. I try to explain to the employees that I am not yakuza, but to no avail.
Recipe for Coma
Ingredients
1. Wake at 3 a.m. to practice yoga at 4.
2. Stay awake all day.
3. That evening, swallow 1,000mgs of Robaxin (generic name: Methocarbamol).
4. Follow that with two hours in a Japanese bath. "Bath" includes sauna, hot tub, ice dip, and steam room. (Note: "hot" tub more accurately called "core of the fucking sun" tub.)
5. After bath, drink half of one shot-glass-sized hot sake.
Directions:
Slide off the restaurant booth into a puddle on the floor, unable to move your limbs. Blink "SOS" in Morse code to alert friends that you are in fact a sentient puddle of water, and that you need to be levered into a taxi with your home address pinned to your lapel.
Drukqs
Psilocybin mushrooms were legal in Japan until three years ago; head shops used to sell baggies of them. In contrast, marijuana is very illegal. People are brought up on criminal charges for failing urine tests.
DMT is still legal and available; I have not inquired about ketamine.
The GG Allin Challenge
Consumer culture has reached its apogee in Tokyo. Fashion has been deconstructed down to the molecular level and codified accordingly; fashion is followed with a rigor and zeal that, as William Gibson says in Pattern Recognition, has become an act of worship.
All of which has pushed me to the other and no less extreme end of the spectrum, the GG Allin Challenge, or the Scum Fuck Possession Fast, which involves giving up material possessions and only living with whatever fits in a brown paper bag.
GG Allin, as I'm sure everyone is aware, was a punk-rock car accident, a perpetual man on fire who wrote classic songs like "Drink, Fight and Fuck," and who hurled obscenities, fists, excrement, and other bodily effluvia on audience members. He swore he was going to kill himself on stage, but overdosed and died before he could make good.
GG had a simple philosophy on life. He had the jacket on his back and could fit everything else he owned in a brown paper bag, in case he needed to blow town, which he often did. The brown paper bag also presumably contained a six-pack and a carton of cigs.
Proposal: 10-day fast with only access to the clothing and toiletries that one is wearing and and one can fit in one regulation-sized brown paper shopping bag. No layering of clothes like girls who cheat at spin the bottle, and no department store bags! (Those are considered sacks.)
Things that are not considered "clothing" and "toiletries," and are as such outside of the fast: books, music, comic books.
You can't use your credit card, either. It's all cash-on-hand. So withdraw some money and live on a budget. You think fucking GG Allin, who wrote an album called Live Fast, Die Fast, had a fucking credit card, college boy? Fuck no.
Ten days? Make it a month.
You could do this no problem in India ... Tokyo, however, as with most places in the West: much harder---not least because it's freezing in Japan right now and you'd fill up the bag with just one sweater.
Okay, so we make it a seasonal fast---spring and summer only.
Which lets me off the hook ... for now.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Subtle and Insidious
The allure to "teach," to be a "teacher." To tell it like it "is." To see the hunger for knowledge in a slight tilt of head and to seize upon it. To enjoy the role of authoriity figure. To enjoy being listened to and taken seriously. To shrug on the coat of gravitas, worldliness, experience. To hesitate at the thought of practicing with students.To hesitate to be seen as anything less than perfect.
Recipe for Antidote
Practice, practice, practice. Practice. Listen more, talk less. Pause before speaking. Inhale, exhale. Always question, yet move spontaneously. Is this about me? Or them? The worst vice is advice. Your truth is not their truth. Your truth is not even your truth. Remember Siddartha Gautama on his deathbed, to his monks: "Be a lamp unto yourselves."
Respect Due
Tim Miller would no doubt laugh, but one of the things I most respect about him is that he practices with his students three times a week. He unrolls his mat just as they (we) do and then puts in the work, gifts and impediments bare for all to see, sattvic and tamasic days alike.
The allure to "teach," to be a "teacher." To tell it like it "is." To see the hunger for knowledge in a slight tilt of head and to seize upon it. To enjoy the role of authoriity figure. To enjoy being listened to and taken seriously. To shrug on the coat of gravitas, worldliness, experience. To hesitate at the thought of practicing with students.To hesitate to be seen as anything less than perfect.
Recipe for Antidote
Practice, practice, practice. Practice. Listen more, talk less. Pause before speaking. Inhale, exhale. Always question, yet move spontaneously. Is this about me? Or them? The worst vice is advice. Your truth is not their truth. Your truth is not even your truth. Remember Siddartha Gautama on his deathbed, to his monks: "Be a lamp unto yourselves."
Respect Due
Tim Miller would no doubt laugh, but one of the things I most respect about him is that he practices with his students three times a week. He unrolls his mat just as they (we) do and then puts in the work, gifts and impediments bare for all to see, sattvic and tamasic days alike.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
What the hell? Where have I been? Why haven't I posted in ages? And why am I in Tokyo?
The Rain Bit
It rained non-stop for seven of our ten-day stay in Auroville last October. It was Indra's fury at the Bay of Bengal manifest as an unending apocalyptic torrent of water, which poured forthl from the sky to blot out the universe. All roads were muddy brown lakes that we forded on motorcylce, ankle-deep. The very walls of our guesthouse exhaled water that soaked through our bed.
Everywhere, everything was mold, mud and grit. And always the fucking rain. After three straight days it had penetrated our skins and skulls and souls.
The murder marked the low point. A young man, a member of one of two local village gangs, was stabbed to death by rival gang-members. For the remainder of our stay, the air was filled with tension and grief and the dull roar of the grey rain.
The Cockroach Bit
Fuck a two-hour car ride from Auroville to Chennai, follwed by a nine-hour train ride home to Mysore. We strapped into seats on Air Deccan for a one-hour flight.
Just before take-off, a fat brown roach skittered over the headrest of the seat in front of me. It waved its antennae and then disappeared, continuing its cabin circumambulations.
Jet Lag
For my money, the best drug on the market. Your circadian rhythms are like, totally fucked, man. As William Gibson says, jet lag is like sending your body someplace, and then waiting a few days for it to reel in your soul.
Two or Three Things About in Tokyo
1. People don't lock up bikes. They just park 'em on the sidewalk, hit the kick-stand, and leave 'em.
2, Don't cross against the light at crowded intersections. Lemming-like, everyone will follow you across the street; even into the face of oncoming traffic.
3. The mouth of Takeshita Street slopes gradually downhill. Hundreds of shoppers clog the street and sidewalk, wall to wall. All twirl, maneuver and otherwise pilot umbrellas to fend off the snow pouring forth from the heavens. It is a delicate dance. I am a full head taller than most everyone, and tower over a sea of bobbing plastic Technicolor domes, red, green, white, black, blue, clear, camouflage; plain or monogrammed. It is a Busby Berkeley set waiting for someone to cry "Action!" to cue synchronized song and dance.
The Power Nap Bit
Mid-day: the kid next to me at the coffee-shop is studying, highlighting a page in a book and taking notes, doubtless preparing himself for the critical entrance exam into eleventh grade. Twenty minutes pass. The kid leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and slides down in the booth, dead asleep.
A friend told me that many Japanese students get very little sleep due to school, after-school tutoring school (called "cram" school), and then more studying.
Waitresses passed too and fro and batted nary an eye. After an hour the kid gave a little snort, woke up, and resumed studying.
The Rain Bit
It rained non-stop for seven of our ten-day stay in Auroville last October. It was Indra's fury at the Bay of Bengal manifest as an unending apocalyptic torrent of water, which poured forthl from the sky to blot out the universe. All roads were muddy brown lakes that we forded on motorcylce, ankle-deep. The very walls of our guesthouse exhaled water that soaked through our bed.
Everywhere, everything was mold, mud and grit. And always the fucking rain. After three straight days it had penetrated our skins and skulls and souls.
The murder marked the low point. A young man, a member of one of two local village gangs, was stabbed to death by rival gang-members. For the remainder of our stay, the air was filled with tension and grief and the dull roar of the grey rain.
The Cockroach Bit
Fuck a two-hour car ride from Auroville to Chennai, follwed by a nine-hour train ride home to Mysore. We strapped into seats on Air Deccan for a one-hour flight.
Just before take-off, a fat brown roach skittered over the headrest of the seat in front of me. It waved its antennae and then disappeared, continuing its cabin circumambulations.
Jet Lag
For my money, the best drug on the market. Your circadian rhythms are like, totally fucked, man. As William Gibson says, jet lag is like sending your body someplace, and then waiting a few days for it to reel in your soul.
Two or Three Things About in Tokyo
1. People don't lock up bikes. They just park 'em on the sidewalk, hit the kick-stand, and leave 'em.
2, Don't cross against the light at crowded intersections. Lemming-like, everyone will follow you across the street; even into the face of oncoming traffic.
3. The mouth of Takeshita Street slopes gradually downhill. Hundreds of shoppers clog the street and sidewalk, wall to wall. All twirl, maneuver and otherwise pilot umbrellas to fend off the snow pouring forth from the heavens. It is a delicate dance. I am a full head taller than most everyone, and tower over a sea of bobbing plastic Technicolor domes, red, green, white, black, blue, clear, camouflage; plain or monogrammed. It is a Busby Berkeley set waiting for someone to cry "Action!" to cue synchronized song and dance.
The Power Nap Bit
Mid-day: the kid next to me at the coffee-shop is studying, highlighting a page in a book and taking notes, doubtless preparing himself for the critical entrance exam into eleventh grade. Twenty minutes pass. The kid leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and slides down in the booth, dead asleep.
A friend told me that many Japanese students get very little sleep due to school, after-school tutoring school (called "cram" school), and then more studying.
Waitresses passed too and fro and batted nary an eye. After an hour the kid gave a little snort, woke up, and resumed studying.
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Straight from the Tap
The milk boy delivers fresh milk---still warm from the udder---every day at 4:30 p.m. for the sum of 7 rupees. We’ve bought a milk pail expressly for the purpose. He pours out a half-liter, then dips back into the bucket with his cup and tops it off with a well-practiced flourish, a graceful mobius swirl of the wrist. The boy does, however, walk into our living room sans knocking, which is quite unnerving. He doesn’t stand in the hallway, doorway or even inside the general front door area: the door will suddenly swing wide and he’ll troop right into the living room. Andrew boils the milk for 2 to 3 minutes; it usually ends up foamed for cappuccino although I’ve been known to pour a bowl for cereal.
We Regret the Passing …
Let me take a moment of silence, head down and on bended knee, for the passing of my position at Cosmodemonic Shoe Co, Inc. My job ended not with the usual ritual pomp and circumstance---the farewell lunch endured, smiles and handshakes apportioned to every cubicle, and the yoga-India monologue recited---but by a gradual and somewhat confused un-entanglement. I worked remotely from India for the last two weeks, responding to certain e-mails, disregarding others, and detaching a little more every day.
Mysore’s Subtle Tyranny
Be free from the idea that you must only read books about yoga! Liberate yourself from the creeping anxiety that your free time must consist of chanting, Sanskrit and Sutra classes! Read John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum! Rent and watch films you would never dream of watching! “American Pie 3!” “40-Year-Old Virgin!” “Orgazmo!”
Casual Piracy
Video Tech is on Kalidasa Road, across from the petrol station. I have to duck my head to enter its open garage-door storefront. Hundreds of VCDs line the racks on the four walls, the DVDs are tucked in a three-foot-tall recessed alcove behind the front counter.
I’m sure I pay Westerner prices---30Rs per DVD!---so they let me sort through the good shit behind the counter. I squat and sit on a stool in confessional and the kid turns on an overhead bulb: “Wedding Crashers,” “Fantastic Four,” “War of the Worlds,” “Red Eye;” incongruously, Renoir’s “The Grand Illusion.”
There’s a 1-in-10 chance my laptop simply won’t read the DVD as existing, and many copies are filmed directly off the screen. We’ve been fortunate, though, as none of the copies we’ve rented have included filmgoers’ heads. “Wedding Crashers” did have an extra audience laugh-track.
I sorted through a basket of music CDs on the counter yesterday. I left with three, for the sum of 15Rs each per day. One CD contained 15 Pink Floyd albums, one contained 11 Metallica albums, and the last contained 13 of the latest pop albums (Backstreet Boys, Jennifer Lopez, Black Eyed Peas, The Scorpions, Richard Marx, and … Nelly?) Tara wanted the two Black Eyed Peas albums, although I swooped the Backstreet Boys album (“Never Gone”) for myself.
Courtesy of Video Tech, last Tuesday I downloaded onto my computer 21 episodes from the third season of “Seinfeld,” and on Sunday the entire first season of “Sex and the City.” Decadent? Maybe. Downright sybaritic? One could make the case ...
The milk boy delivers fresh milk---still warm from the udder---every day at 4:30 p.m. for the sum of 7 rupees. We’ve bought a milk pail expressly for the purpose. He pours out a half-liter, then dips back into the bucket with his cup and tops it off with a well-practiced flourish, a graceful mobius swirl of the wrist. The boy does, however, walk into our living room sans knocking, which is quite unnerving. He doesn’t stand in the hallway, doorway or even inside the general front door area: the door will suddenly swing wide and he’ll troop right into the living room. Andrew boils the milk for 2 to 3 minutes; it usually ends up foamed for cappuccino although I’ve been known to pour a bowl for cereal.
We Regret the Passing …
Let me take a moment of silence, head down and on bended knee, for the passing of my position at Cosmodemonic Shoe Co, Inc. My job ended not with the usual ritual pomp and circumstance---the farewell lunch endured, smiles and handshakes apportioned to every cubicle, and the yoga-India monologue recited---but by a gradual and somewhat confused un-entanglement. I worked remotely from India for the last two weeks, responding to certain e-mails, disregarding others, and detaching a little more every day.
Mysore’s Subtle Tyranny
Be free from the idea that you must only read books about yoga! Liberate yourself from the creeping anxiety that your free time must consist of chanting, Sanskrit and Sutra classes! Read John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum! Rent and watch films you would never dream of watching! “American Pie 3!” “40-Year-Old Virgin!” “Orgazmo!”
Casual Piracy
Video Tech is on Kalidasa Road, across from the petrol station. I have to duck my head to enter its open garage-door storefront. Hundreds of VCDs line the racks on the four walls, the DVDs are tucked in a three-foot-tall recessed alcove behind the front counter.
I’m sure I pay Westerner prices---30Rs per DVD!---so they let me sort through the good shit behind the counter. I squat and sit on a stool in confessional and the kid turns on an overhead bulb: “Wedding Crashers,” “Fantastic Four,” “War of the Worlds,” “Red Eye;” incongruously, Renoir’s “The Grand Illusion.”
There’s a 1-in-10 chance my laptop simply won’t read the DVD as existing, and many copies are filmed directly off the screen. We’ve been fortunate, though, as none of the copies we’ve rented have included filmgoers’ heads. “Wedding Crashers” did have an extra audience laugh-track.
I sorted through a basket of music CDs on the counter yesterday. I left with three, for the sum of 15Rs each per day. One CD contained 15 Pink Floyd albums, one contained 11 Metallica albums, and the last contained 13 of the latest pop albums (Backstreet Boys, Jennifer Lopez, Black Eyed Peas, The Scorpions, Richard Marx, and … Nelly?) Tara wanted the two Black Eyed Peas albums, although I swooped the Backstreet Boys album (“Never Gone”) for myself.
Courtesy of Video Tech, last Tuesday I downloaded onto my computer 21 episodes from the third season of “Seinfeld,” and on Sunday the entire first season of “Sex and the City.” Decadent? Maybe. Downright sybaritic? One could make the case ...
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Lakshmipuram Organic Market
From Gokulam, we scooter through the Mysore University grounds on our way to Lakshmipuram. Tara wears the baby in a frontal sling. Rowan is a tiny pushpin in a fluorescent Styrofoam helmet that engulfs her baby head. The helmet slips down over her eyes, so she uses her delicate baby hands to hold it up so she can survey the scenery. Andrew pilots the other scooter, Allison on back, blonde hair trailing in the wind. We’re an eye-catching bunch.
The intensity ratchets upwards during the drive. Lakshmipuram is more compact, tighter, louder, more intense than Gokulam. It’s more concentrated India.
Andrew has found the new location of the organic market he frequented on his first trip in 2001. It’s now in a rundown, mould-covered house, in which the “market” takes up one walk-in closet-sized room. Weevils sit in sacks of dal and spiders leap from underneath bunches of bananas. Andrew buys organic mung dal, liquid jaggery, organic coffee, some honey. Allison stocks up on greens.
Tara and I take baby out front. Her blonde hair and translucent skin are an instant hit with the Indian men sitting around the entrance. One man is an endless fount of folk medicine: One drop of honey on the baby’s tongue per morning, he says, will make her learn to talk better, faster. For teething pain, rub sugar on her gums.
We show baby Rowan to the cow grazing across the street. “Woof, woof,” says Rowan; it’s what she now says when she sees any animal. A two-foot piece of rope ties the cow’s neck collar to its front foreleg. It can’t raise its head more than two feet from the ground.
The folk-medicine man tells us the cow is so dumb that it will walk into and through cars, people, and glass windows. Therefore its gaze is roped down. Somehow it seems cruel. I’d never seen a live farm animal until India, though, so I’m very much out of my depth.
Andrew and Allison finish shopping, and we scooter back to Gokulam. Later, Andrew uses his new coffee in my stovetop espresso maker. When it begins hissing, Andrew lifts the lid. “Look,” he says, “it’s boiling out like cream!” And it’s true: the organic coffee is foaming through the slit like cream.
Getting Internet
Andrew bought two Apple iSight cameras prior to coming to India, one for my Mac, one for his wife’s Mac; he would be able to see and talk to her and his 2-year-old son.
We fished two Internet contact names from the Internet place around the corner and called them. “No connection is possible in your neighborhood,” the first place told us.
We met with a representative from the second place. They wanted a 10,000 Rupee deposit. They had hooked up broadband for a Western yoga student before and the student had made 30,000 Rupees-worth of long-distance calls before vanishing back to the West.
Our landlady’s son intervened. They are putting the connection in their name---no deposit, no installation fee.
We returned from yoga practice one day last week to find an amorphous swarm of workers, numbering not less than eight and not more than 11, chopping up the street to lay the cable for our Internet connection.
On our way to breakfast, in front of the house, and in front of the line of workers, I loaned Andrew 100 Rupees, separating the bill from the others in my wallet, realizing too late I had flippantly flashed a week’s wages to the dark, sun-creased, squat men pick-axing the dirt.
The small army worked for four or five hours, then vanished as they’d appeared.
The cable is laid, but the Internet is still not functioning as we’re now circumnavigating the language barrier and Byzantine Indian business practices to have the wires connected.
The Yoga?
The shala numbers dwindle; perhaps 20 people waited out front last Thursday? Tara and I have been leaving Rowan with Nirmala, our landlady, who has agreed to watch Rowan six days a week, two hours a day, for 1,000 Rupees a month. Guruji has told us to arrive at 5:30, and the last week-and-a-half we’ve entered the studio to an ever-increasing number of floor vacancies.
The density in my back and shoulders, which accreted during six weeks of crisscrossing the U.S. via planes, trains and automobiles, has started to melt. My body unkinked from the flight sometime last week. I had been having strong, light practices, and then one day I felt grounded, strong and light.
Guruji is 90 and fiery. He pads about the room, squat and powerful, shouting, eyes twinkling. Last week he suffered from a deep, wet cough, but it seems to have cleared.
Tara, Andrew and I (and Rowan) registered together, and Guruji demanded to know when our teacher Tim would be arriving, to which I lamely replied, “December?” It seemed a fair guess.
Guruji shuffled our stacks of money into his latest accessory, an electronic money counter, which immediately conjured images of the last few places I’d seen the device, namely at the homes of my drug-dealer acquaintances and in the movie “Scarface.” The machine whirred and beeped when it had processed our 54 500-Rupee notes. Gangster!
What else? Show up early, breathe, move. There are moments of an emptiness so full, a silence so loud I only notice them when they’ve passed.
I did not bow my head to Guruji’s feet on my last trip. Not once. This time it is different. There is a swelling, expansive, sternum-cracking gratitude that puts tears in my eyes---how fortunate I am to inhabit this body! To have found this practice!---and Guruji laughs and says, “Tankew, tankew,” as though I’m doing him a favor.
Fever and Slapstick
The baby today shed the last vestiges of a two-day fever; in June she was much, much more sick---wan and listless, shrouded on our bed, chest fluttering like a baby-bird---but it was still nerve-wracking.
I slipped on a throw rug in our living room and sprained my wrist pursuing a mosquito. Ha! I’ve been performing vinyasa on fists and fingertips.
From Gokulam, we scooter through the Mysore University grounds on our way to Lakshmipuram. Tara wears the baby in a frontal sling. Rowan is a tiny pushpin in a fluorescent Styrofoam helmet that engulfs her baby head. The helmet slips down over her eyes, so she uses her delicate baby hands to hold it up so she can survey the scenery. Andrew pilots the other scooter, Allison on back, blonde hair trailing in the wind. We’re an eye-catching bunch.
The intensity ratchets upwards during the drive. Lakshmipuram is more compact, tighter, louder, more intense than Gokulam. It’s more concentrated India.
Andrew has found the new location of the organic market he frequented on his first trip in 2001. It’s now in a rundown, mould-covered house, in which the “market” takes up one walk-in closet-sized room. Weevils sit in sacks of dal and spiders leap from underneath bunches of bananas. Andrew buys organic mung dal, liquid jaggery, organic coffee, some honey. Allison stocks up on greens.
Tara and I take baby out front. Her blonde hair and translucent skin are an instant hit with the Indian men sitting around the entrance. One man is an endless fount of folk medicine: One drop of honey on the baby’s tongue per morning, he says, will make her learn to talk better, faster. For teething pain, rub sugar on her gums.
We show baby Rowan to the cow grazing across the street. “Woof, woof,” says Rowan; it’s what she now says when she sees any animal. A two-foot piece of rope ties the cow’s neck collar to its front foreleg. It can’t raise its head more than two feet from the ground.
The folk-medicine man tells us the cow is so dumb that it will walk into and through cars, people, and glass windows. Therefore its gaze is roped down. Somehow it seems cruel. I’d never seen a live farm animal until India, though, so I’m very much out of my depth.
Andrew and Allison finish shopping, and we scooter back to Gokulam. Later, Andrew uses his new coffee in my stovetop espresso maker. When it begins hissing, Andrew lifts the lid. “Look,” he says, “it’s boiling out like cream!” And it’s true: the organic coffee is foaming through the slit like cream.
Getting Internet
Andrew bought two Apple iSight cameras prior to coming to India, one for my Mac, one for his wife’s Mac; he would be able to see and talk to her and his 2-year-old son.
We fished two Internet contact names from the Internet place around the corner and called them. “No connection is possible in your neighborhood,” the first place told us.
We met with a representative from the second place. They wanted a 10,000 Rupee deposit. They had hooked up broadband for a Western yoga student before and the student had made 30,000 Rupees-worth of long-distance calls before vanishing back to the West.
Our landlady’s son intervened. They are putting the connection in their name---no deposit, no installation fee.
We returned from yoga practice one day last week to find an amorphous swarm of workers, numbering not less than eight and not more than 11, chopping up the street to lay the cable for our Internet connection.
On our way to breakfast, in front of the house, and in front of the line of workers, I loaned Andrew 100 Rupees, separating the bill from the others in my wallet, realizing too late I had flippantly flashed a week’s wages to the dark, sun-creased, squat men pick-axing the dirt.
The small army worked for four or five hours, then vanished as they’d appeared.
The cable is laid, but the Internet is still not functioning as we’re now circumnavigating the language barrier and Byzantine Indian business practices to have the wires connected.
The Yoga?
The shala numbers dwindle; perhaps 20 people waited out front last Thursday? Tara and I have been leaving Rowan with Nirmala, our landlady, who has agreed to watch Rowan six days a week, two hours a day, for 1,000 Rupees a month. Guruji has told us to arrive at 5:30, and the last week-and-a-half we’ve entered the studio to an ever-increasing number of floor vacancies.
The density in my back and shoulders, which accreted during six weeks of crisscrossing the U.S. via planes, trains and automobiles, has started to melt. My body unkinked from the flight sometime last week. I had been having strong, light practices, and then one day I felt grounded, strong and light.
Guruji is 90 and fiery. He pads about the room, squat and powerful, shouting, eyes twinkling. Last week he suffered from a deep, wet cough, but it seems to have cleared.
Tara, Andrew and I (and Rowan) registered together, and Guruji demanded to know when our teacher Tim would be arriving, to which I lamely replied, “December?” It seemed a fair guess.
Guruji shuffled our stacks of money into his latest accessory, an electronic money counter, which immediately conjured images of the last few places I’d seen the device, namely at the homes of my drug-dealer acquaintances and in the movie “Scarface.” The machine whirred and beeped when it had processed our 54 500-Rupee notes. Gangster!
What else? Show up early, breathe, move. There are moments of an emptiness so full, a silence so loud I only notice them when they’ve passed.
I did not bow my head to Guruji’s feet on my last trip. Not once. This time it is different. There is a swelling, expansive, sternum-cracking gratitude that puts tears in my eyes---how fortunate I am to inhabit this body! To have found this practice!---and Guruji laughs and says, “Tankew, tankew,” as though I’m doing him a favor.
Fever and Slapstick
The baby today shed the last vestiges of a two-day fever; in June she was much, much more sick---wan and listless, shrouded on our bed, chest fluttering like a baby-bird---but it was still nerve-wracking.
I slipped on a throw rug in our living room and sprained my wrist pursuing a mosquito. Ha! I’ve been performing vinyasa on fists and fingertips.
Sunday, September 4, 2005
Kuala Lumpur Jump-off
A tenuous thread binds consciousness to its vehicle, this body.
That thread is fraying, unraveling around the edges. What time is it? What day is it? Somewhere in the last 19 hours of flying I lost a day, or gained one.
My brain is a balloon floating over my body, and there is a fractional second of time delay between thought and motor response, command and movement.
Andrew, Tara and Baby Rowan are upstairs, sleeping in our courtesy rooms at the Pan-Pacific Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. I write this in the Business Center, staring at the monitor as though down a long, dark tunnel.
Jetlag is fucked, but I kind of like it when things get loopy.
Baby Rowan is one mellow toddler, her disposition in stark contrast to the India couple with whom we shared a row---every time their 2-year-old opened her eyes, she began screaming.
I've heard sunlight is great for the 'lag, so I'm now hustling to the hotel pool---waterfall! hot tub!---to soak the sun and unknot from the plane.
Pre-Mysore Numbers
Height: 6-feet-1-and-a-half inches
Weight: 143 pounds
Disposition: Sunny, tired, yet hyper-caffeinated
A tenuous thread binds consciousness to its vehicle, this body.
That thread is fraying, unraveling around the edges. What time is it? What day is it? Somewhere in the last 19 hours of flying I lost a day, or gained one.
My brain is a balloon floating over my body, and there is a fractional second of time delay between thought and motor response, command and movement.
Andrew, Tara and Baby Rowan are upstairs, sleeping in our courtesy rooms at the Pan-Pacific Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. I write this in the Business Center, staring at the monitor as though down a long, dark tunnel.
Jetlag is fucked, but I kind of like it when things get loopy.
Baby Rowan is one mellow toddler, her disposition in stark contrast to the India couple with whom we shared a row---every time their 2-year-old opened her eyes, she began screaming.
I've heard sunlight is great for the 'lag, so I'm now hustling to the hotel pool---waterfall! hot tub!---to soak the sun and unknot from the plane.
Pre-Mysore Numbers
Height: 6-feet-1-and-a-half inches
Weight: 143 pounds
Disposition: Sunny, tired, yet hyper-caffeinated
Kuala Lumpur Jump-off
A tenuous thread binds consciousness to its vehicle, this body.
That thread is fraying, unraveling around the edges. What time is it? What day is it? Somewhere in the last 19 hours of flying I lost a day, or gained one.
My brain is a balloon floating over my body, and there is a fractional second of time delay between thought and motor response, command and movement.
Andrew, Tara and Baby Rowan are upstairs, sleeping in our courtesy rooms at the Pan-Pacific Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. I write this in the Business Center, staring at the monitor as though down a long, dark tunnel.
Jetlag is fucked, but I kind of like it when things get loopy.
Baby Rowan is one mellow toddler, her disposition in stark contrast to the India couple with whom we shared a row---every time their 2-year-old opened her eyes, she began screaming.
I've heard sunlight is great for the 'lag, so I'm now hustling to the hotel pool---waterfall! hot tub!---to soak the sun and unknot from the plane.
Pre-Mysore Numbers
Height: 6-feet-1-and-a-half inches
Weight: 143 pounds
Disposition: Sunny, tired, yet hyper-caffeinated
A tenuous thread binds consciousness to its vehicle, this body.
That thread is fraying, unraveling around the edges. What time is it? What day is it? Somewhere in the last 19 hours of flying I lost a day, or gained one.
My brain is a balloon floating over my body, and there is a fractional second of time delay between thought and motor response, command and movement.
Andrew, Tara and Baby Rowan are upstairs, sleeping in our courtesy rooms at the Pan-Pacific Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. I write this in the Business Center, staring at the monitor as though down a long, dark tunnel.
Jetlag is fucked, but I kind of like it when things get loopy.
Baby Rowan is one mellow toddler, her disposition in stark contrast to the India couple with whom we shared a row---every time their 2-year-old opened her eyes, she began screaming.
I've heard sunlight is great for the 'lag, so I'm now hustling to the hotel pool---waterfall! hot tub!---to soak the sun and unknot from the plane.
Pre-Mysore Numbers
Height: 6-feet-1-and-a-half inches
Weight: 143 pounds
Disposition: Sunny, tired, yet hyper-caffeinated
Monday, August 15, 2005
We leave for Bangalore September 3.
My first trip to India crested on a giant wave of anticipation built from more than five months of waiting, planning, calculating and clock-watching at work. This trip has leapt from an alley-mouth to sucker-punch me in the kidney.
It's fucking two weeks away, man!
Unlike my first trip, I'm traveling with three other people, two full-sized humans (albeit one Australian) and an adorable one-year-old diaper-filler.
The baby's mother voiced strenuous objections to my rather ingenious idea to stow said nipper in a steamer trunk under the plane with some juice boxes, a blanket or two and several well-concealed air-holes.
My other idea, which also met with vociferous disapproval, stemmed from my life-long passion for falconry, and involved fashioning a black light-tight hood for the baby. Slip the hood over the knee-biter's head, she thinks it's sleepy-time, and whammo, instant 20-hour nap.
As it stands, my provisions list involves one gross ear plugs, one blindfold, one bottle of the sleeping pill/coma-inducing Ambien, and two liters vodka.
There are several conditions, or combinations thereof, that will determine when I return:
1. I run out of money.
2. I go out of my gourd.
3. I get severely homesick.
4. My back snaps in half.
My first trip to India crested on a giant wave of anticipation built from more than five months of waiting, planning, calculating and clock-watching at work. This trip has leapt from an alley-mouth to sucker-punch me in the kidney.
It's fucking two weeks away, man!
Unlike my first trip, I'm traveling with three other people, two full-sized humans (albeit one Australian) and an adorable one-year-old diaper-filler.
The baby's mother voiced strenuous objections to my rather ingenious idea to stow said nipper in a steamer trunk under the plane with some juice boxes, a blanket or two and several well-concealed air-holes.
My other idea, which also met with vociferous disapproval, stemmed from my life-long passion for falconry, and involved fashioning a black light-tight hood for the baby. Slip the hood over the knee-biter's head, she thinks it's sleepy-time, and whammo, instant 20-hour nap.
As it stands, my provisions list involves one gross ear plugs, one blindfold, one bottle of the sleeping pill/coma-inducing Ambien, and two liters vodka.
There are several conditions, or combinations thereof, that will determine when I return:
1. I run out of money.
2. I go out of my gourd.
3. I get severely homesick.
4. My back snaps in half.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
New Espresso Bean of Choice
Giro d'Italia
Not Washing the Stove-top Espresso Maker
Apparently the bacteria build-up adds to the flavor.
The New "Battlestar Galactica"
The mini-series and entire first season on DVD for $40 at San Diego Comic-con. O Lord, you are a just and benevolent God.
Downloading Limewire Porn Clips
I'm perfectly sure I don't know what you're talking about.
Mysore Packing Strategy
One backpack filled with clothes, toiletries, stove-top espresso maker, and other essentials. One steamer trunk filled with books.
Inhale
Hanuman.
Exhale
Shiva.
Summer Weekend in Milwaukee
It really seems to be true: Americans are lard-asses!
Saying Goodbye to Grandma for Maybe the Last Time
Breathing, breathing. Pain is going.
My Buddhist Friend Said, "Would You Be Sad to See a Sunset?"
No. But that does nothing for the lump of grief in my chest.
The Baby Cries in the Other Room
So it goes.
Giro d'Italia
Not Washing the Stove-top Espresso Maker
Apparently the bacteria build-up adds to the flavor.
The New "Battlestar Galactica"
The mini-series and entire first season on DVD for $40 at San Diego Comic-con. O Lord, you are a just and benevolent God.
Downloading Limewire Porn Clips
I'm perfectly sure I don't know what you're talking about.
Mysore Packing Strategy
One backpack filled with clothes, toiletries, stove-top espresso maker, and other essentials. One steamer trunk filled with books.
Inhale
Hanuman.
Exhale
Shiva.
Summer Weekend in Milwaukee
It really seems to be true: Americans are lard-asses!
Saying Goodbye to Grandma for Maybe the Last Time
Breathing, breathing. Pain is going.
My Buddhist Friend Said, "Would You Be Sad to See a Sunset?"
No. But that does nothing for the lump of grief in my chest.
The Baby Cries in the Other Room
So it goes.
Friday, July 8, 2005
I love Saul-to-Damascus stories, and Lillian's is one of the best: she came to Ashtanga yoga standing in the bathroom of a dive bar at 4 a.m., coked up and staring at herself in the mirror, a bloody chunk of septum in her right hand.
Not everyone is pitched from horseback by the voice of god. Sometimes the call is loud and overpowering, but sometimes it's a faint, ghostly echo, barely heard over the roar of the party and the music from the jukebox.
Lil had partied Wednesday and Thursday nights with little sleep in between. Friday night flickered into early Sunday morning as the party train hit all stops: bar to club, club to house, house to bar. Last stop: Gentleman Jack's, a downtown San Diego dive, small, cramped, dark, seedy.
The bartenders swept out the crowds at 2 a.m. They locked the front door, pulled the blinds, killed the lights, fired up the jukebox, and dumped thick white rocks of coke on the bar. A guy pulled out a hand coffee-grinder and started churning the rocks into powder. Everyone took turns hoovering finger-width lines off the bar.
At 4 a.m. Lil was in the bathroom wiping the drip from her nose. The coke had revved her heart's RPMs so high she could feel the fist-sized muscle thumping into her breastbone, threatening to tear free from its moorings.
And her nose! It itched so bad! She had this booger that just would not quit. Lil closed off one nostril and with a firm snort, blew a thick, blood-red chunk of scab into her hand. It was a piece of her septum.
"Beyond a certain point there is no return," said Kafka. "This point has to be reached." A piece of her nose in hand, Lil had a coke-fueled flash-panic anxiety attack. At that point---her point of no return---three clear thoughts whispered through the din: "I need to stop partying," "I need to get healthy or I'm going to die," and "I need to start doing yoga."
She doesn't know where the last thought came from---maybe she'd read about yoga in Vogue? Regardless, the seed had been planted somewhere. She sifted those three thoughts like a prospector panning for gold, and after a bit of trial and error, found Ashtanga vinyasa.
That was four years ago. Today Lillian is strong, healthy and most importanly, alive.
Not everyone is pitched from horseback by the voice of god. Sometimes the call is loud and overpowering, but sometimes it's a faint, ghostly echo, barely heard over the roar of the party and the music from the jukebox.
Lil had partied Wednesday and Thursday nights with little sleep in between. Friday night flickered into early Sunday morning as the party train hit all stops: bar to club, club to house, house to bar. Last stop: Gentleman Jack's, a downtown San Diego dive, small, cramped, dark, seedy.
The bartenders swept out the crowds at 2 a.m. They locked the front door, pulled the blinds, killed the lights, fired up the jukebox, and dumped thick white rocks of coke on the bar. A guy pulled out a hand coffee-grinder and started churning the rocks into powder. Everyone took turns hoovering finger-width lines off the bar.
At 4 a.m. Lil was in the bathroom wiping the drip from her nose. The coke had revved her heart's RPMs so high she could feel the fist-sized muscle thumping into her breastbone, threatening to tear free from its moorings.
And her nose! It itched so bad! She had this booger that just would not quit. Lil closed off one nostril and with a firm snort, blew a thick, blood-red chunk of scab into her hand. It was a piece of her septum.
"Beyond a certain point there is no return," said Kafka. "This point has to be reached." A piece of her nose in hand, Lil had a coke-fueled flash-panic anxiety attack. At that point---her point of no return---three clear thoughts whispered through the din: "I need to stop partying," "I need to get healthy or I'm going to die," and "I need to start doing yoga."
She doesn't know where the last thought came from---maybe she'd read about yoga in Vogue? Regardless, the seed had been planted somewhere. She sifted those three thoughts like a prospector panning for gold, and after a bit of trial and error, found Ashtanga vinyasa.
That was four years ago. Today Lillian is strong, healthy and most importanly, alive.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
My June Itinerary
I spent five days in Los Angeles at the Downtown Standard hotel, followed that up with two days in Encinitas, then hit Dayton, Ohio for four days.
Someone once asked Tim how a trip went; to paraphrase his answer: too much skateboarding, vodka, and dessert. Not enough yoga.
Highlights
(Among others): meeting "Inside the Actor's Studio's" James Lipton, asking him about his most difficult interviewees (Barbara Streisand, Robert De Niro), tripping out on LA ("Isn't that Hillary Duff?"), telling Anthony Michael Hall "That's a good look for you, buddy" in a dressing room, seeing a kid get choked to unconsciousness for $20 in a hotel bar, and watching two friends get car-jacked at a gas station.
(Don't sleep on Dayton! Thug life!)
Christ.
All I can say is it's good to be home and settled.
I've written my first play.
It's not actually a play. It's actually conversations to which I was privy that I then wrote down. I wish I could take credit, but reality is so much more unbelievable than anything I could think up.
Three Vignettes from the Downtown Los Angeles Standard Hotel
Out front of the hotel; a WOMAN behind a podium scans a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard. A BEEFY BOUNCER, ear bud tucked in ear, holds a flashlight. A CUTE GIRL (early 20s) stands behind a velvet rope.
BEEFY BOUNCER: … so there it is, you're not on the list. Sorry about that.
CUTE GIRL: (Playing coquettishly with pearl necklace, head cocked.) There must be something I can do to get in … can we go somewhere to talk about this?
End scene.
Two faceless CLERKS stand behind the reception desk. A short-haired WASTED WOMAN droops on the bench in front of the desk.
WASTED WOMAN: (Into cell-phone) Baby, c'mon baby---don't say that baby, please, I love you. Just come get me. Baby! Please. Just come pick me up. Please pick me up.
(Slides off bench to floor.)
End scene.
Three SLICK DUDES ride the elevator to the ultra-exclusive roof-top bar.
DUDE 1: Did you hear that fucking bitch? All I said was hi, she was all, "Who the fuck are you?" What a skank.
DUDE 2: Did you hear what TJ said to that one bitch at the bar the other night? She gave him some attitude and he was like, "You're not that pretty and you're kind of thick, too, so why don't you fuck off with that fake Hollywood shit?"
(To DUDE 3) Dude you totally fucking gave it to her, man!
DUDE 3: (Eyes self in elevator mirror, adjusts hair.) Fuckin a.
Elevator doors open.
Curtain.
Why I Hate Rilke
Dense black obsidian verse that reflects all light.
Verse impenetrable to burrowing, chewing, digestion.
Best approached laterally, obliquely.
The lightning will strike in peripheral vision like a balled-fist haymaker in an unfamiliar alley.
In due time meaning detonates, but only in those parts of consciousness inaccessible during the light of day or under the microscope of logic.
I spent five days in Los Angeles at the Downtown Standard hotel, followed that up with two days in Encinitas, then hit Dayton, Ohio for four days.
Someone once asked Tim how a trip went; to paraphrase his answer: too much skateboarding, vodka, and dessert. Not enough yoga.
Highlights
(Among others): meeting "Inside the Actor's Studio's" James Lipton, asking him about his most difficult interviewees (Barbara Streisand, Robert De Niro), tripping out on LA ("Isn't that Hillary Duff?"), telling Anthony Michael Hall "That's a good look for you, buddy" in a dressing room, seeing a kid get choked to unconsciousness for $20 in a hotel bar, and watching two friends get car-jacked at a gas station.
(Don't sleep on Dayton! Thug life!)
Christ.
All I can say is it's good to be home and settled.
I've written my first play.
It's not actually a play. It's actually conversations to which I was privy that I then wrote down. I wish I could take credit, but reality is so much more unbelievable than anything I could think up.
Three Vignettes from the Downtown Los Angeles Standard Hotel
Out front of the hotel; a WOMAN behind a podium scans a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard. A BEEFY BOUNCER, ear bud tucked in ear, holds a flashlight. A CUTE GIRL (early 20s) stands behind a velvet rope.
BEEFY BOUNCER: … so there it is, you're not on the list. Sorry about that.
CUTE GIRL: (Playing coquettishly with pearl necklace, head cocked.) There must be something I can do to get in … can we go somewhere to talk about this?
End scene.
Two faceless CLERKS stand behind the reception desk. A short-haired WASTED WOMAN droops on the bench in front of the desk.
WASTED WOMAN: (Into cell-phone) Baby, c'mon baby---don't say that baby, please, I love you. Just come get me. Baby! Please. Just come pick me up. Please pick me up.
(Slides off bench to floor.)
End scene.
Three SLICK DUDES ride the elevator to the ultra-exclusive roof-top bar.
DUDE 1: Did you hear that fucking bitch? All I said was hi, she was all, "Who the fuck are you?" What a skank.
DUDE 2: Did you hear what TJ said to that one bitch at the bar the other night? She gave him some attitude and he was like, "You're not that pretty and you're kind of thick, too, so why don't you fuck off with that fake Hollywood shit?"
(To DUDE 3) Dude you totally fucking gave it to her, man!
DUDE 3: (Eyes self in elevator mirror, adjusts hair.) Fuckin a.
Elevator doors open.
Curtain.
Why I Hate Rilke
Dense black obsidian verse that reflects all light.
Verse impenetrable to burrowing, chewing, digestion.
Best approached laterally, obliquely.
The lightning will strike in peripheral vision like a balled-fist haymaker in an unfamiliar alley.
In due time meaning detonates, but only in those parts of consciousness inaccessible during the light of day or under the microscope of logic.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Shane was tall, taller than me at 6-2, thinning hair swept up in a rockabilly pompadour and babyish good looks slowly losing the war against fat. He would show up at the studio in white V-neck T-shirts and always smelled strongly, pleasantly of coffee. I want to say he had a bunch of Sailor Jerry tattoos, too, bright and optimistic, the Bettie Page pin-up girls, swallows, stars, and hearts reminding me of forties funny pages with their raw pulp-color brilliance and nostalgia.
I had committed to a daily morning Mysore practice at the yoga studio, a move that had jimmied open a whole new perspective on the yoga and introduced me to a whole new cast of characters: the morning shift.
My girlfriend and I were living in the Mission in San Francisco, on 27th and Guerrero, in a slant-floored firetrap. The flat's amenities included splinters from the peeling wood floor and, living in the building's common basement, an uncountable and ever-changing mass of illegals sleeping on sweat-stained mattresses. On weekends the group of small, sun-darkened men would drink cases of beer and listen to what sounded to me like Mexican polka music, the bomp-bomp of the drum and nerve-grating whine of accordion turned up as loud as it would go. I never felt in any physical danger, but the men on the street would hiss and sometimes grab at Tiffany, so I feared what the men in the basement might do, nerves galvanized by cases of beer.
The yoga studio, Ahimsa, was only a few blocks away on foot. Alice, with her fierce full-back tattoo of Kali, had turned an old storefront into a warm and inviting yoga studio tucked between a grocery and a storefront church.
Shane was gregarious, friendly, quick to laugh. He was inconstant in his practice because, as I soon found out, he was a member of the dock-worker's union. A few mornings a week he would head to the union office to put his number in the lottery for work. I imagined the job hard and exhausting, calloused men in peacoats and beanies cursing in the cold and fog, wrestling giant crates, twisting crowbars, banging, slamming, heaving, and groaning.
Months passed. My girlfriend and I moved to a better apartment in order to better unravel, and Alice eventually closed the studio to have a baby. Shane joined a long and ever-growing list of people I idly wonder about---people I knew only in passing, yet with whom I was profoundly intimate, peope I saw every day, six days a week, for months on end, all of us sweaty and half-naked, moments of poise and grace alternated with shaky struggling and ragged vulnerability. Where is Shane now? Maybe practicing yoga, maybe hauling crates on the Oakland dock, maybe lolling about the union office, waiting for his number to pop up, hair a bit thinner, face a bit fuller, bright tattoos beaming, still quick to smile, still fast with a joke, still good for a laugh.
I had committed to a daily morning Mysore practice at the yoga studio, a move that had jimmied open a whole new perspective on the yoga and introduced me to a whole new cast of characters: the morning shift.
My girlfriend and I were living in the Mission in San Francisco, on 27th and Guerrero, in a slant-floored firetrap. The flat's amenities included splinters from the peeling wood floor and, living in the building's common basement, an uncountable and ever-changing mass of illegals sleeping on sweat-stained mattresses. On weekends the group of small, sun-darkened men would drink cases of beer and listen to what sounded to me like Mexican polka music, the bomp-bomp of the drum and nerve-grating whine of accordion turned up as loud as it would go. I never felt in any physical danger, but the men on the street would hiss and sometimes grab at Tiffany, so I feared what the men in the basement might do, nerves galvanized by cases of beer.
The yoga studio, Ahimsa, was only a few blocks away on foot. Alice, with her fierce full-back tattoo of Kali, had turned an old storefront into a warm and inviting yoga studio tucked between a grocery and a storefront church.
Shane was gregarious, friendly, quick to laugh. He was inconstant in his practice because, as I soon found out, he was a member of the dock-worker's union. A few mornings a week he would head to the union office to put his number in the lottery for work. I imagined the job hard and exhausting, calloused men in peacoats and beanies cursing in the cold and fog, wrestling giant crates, twisting crowbars, banging, slamming, heaving, and groaning.
Months passed. My girlfriend and I moved to a better apartment in order to better unravel, and Alice eventually closed the studio to have a baby. Shane joined a long and ever-growing list of people I idly wonder about---people I knew only in passing, yet with whom I was profoundly intimate, peope I saw every day, six days a week, for months on end, all of us sweaty and half-naked, moments of poise and grace alternated with shaky struggling and ragged vulnerability. Where is Shane now? Maybe practicing yoga, maybe hauling crates on the Oakland dock, maybe lolling about the union office, waiting for his number to pop up, hair a bit thinner, face a bit fuller, bright tattoos beaming, still quick to smile, still fast with a joke, still good for a laugh.
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