The Last Post

So, I'm retiring this blog.

As you can probably tell from the long silences between increasingly uninspired posts (the Indonesia one being one of the laziest things I have ever written), my enthusiasm for this blog has been dying some time.

There are a number of reasons. For a start, I'm too busy. One of the things that keeps me busy is writing exhibition reviews and articles about art in Tokyo every other week or so, and even though this writing doesn't have any personal content in it, it still satisfies my need to write and brings me a sense of reward that I don't really get out of this blog anymore. Also, since I started to use Flickr, I've enjoyed blogging about my life in photos as opposed to words.

I started this blog because I thought it would be a better way of keeping in touch with far away friends than sending out mass emails. I had also just graduated and was moving to Japan, and there was a lot of excitement and novelty that I wanted to convey, not to mention the tons free time I had in which to do it. Now my life in Tokyo is entirely the norm and I even though I see ridiculous things all the time, I don't in any way feel compelled to write about them.

There was also more of a community around this blog at the time I started, and I enjoyed keeping up with my friends at "Fraancofinn" and "Last one to Bed", but they have also, for their various reasons, stopped updating, and so it kind of feels like I'm blogging into a vacuum. I will probably leave the blog online, but I doubt I will write again. If I ever have a reason to start a new blog, then I'll let you know.

I know some of you read this blog, but from now on I'm going to stick to Flickr and individual emails for conveying what my life in Tokyo is like. Best of all, it would be great if you guys could come out here and let me show you around.

So Mr Moshi Moshi says arigato and sayonara.

Why does God hate Indonesia?

This is just a selected overview of some of the disasters to hit Indonesia over the last two years.

2007

Mar 7 - Airliner crashes on landing at Yogyakarta, killing several people.
Feb 9 - Authorities to disinfect Jakarta, thousands ill.
Feb 5 - Floods leave 340,000 homeless Death toll climbs to 25
Jan 1 - 102 killed when domestic flight crashes

2006

Dec 29 - Ship sinks in storm, 600 missing
Sep 29 - Boeing 737 collides with private jet in mid air, killing 154
Jul 17 - 650 dead as 7.2 earthquake triggers tsunami
Jul 9 - Russian S7 Airbus A-310 skids off runway, killing 124
Jun 22 - Flood toll passes 200
Jun 15 - Volcano eruption traps two
May 27 - Java earthquake kills 6,000, 20,000 hurt and 200,000 left homeless.
May 14 - New warning as volcano intensifies
May 12 - Red alert for volcano Mount Merapi
May 3 - Airbus crashes into Black Sea, killing all 113 people on board
Jan 3 - Java village buried by landslide

2005

Mar 28 - Quake kills at least 300 on island of Nias
Jan 19 - Tsunami deaths soar past 212,000

2004

Dec 24 - 9.0 quake leaves 212,000 dead


Of course, the Onion manages to make light of it all in style.

I LOVE Bic Camera!

I came home this evening to find the usual pile of junk mail and bills in the letterbox, including two from Bic Camera, which was a first. Both said "present inside" and expecting something with a cartoon cat drawn on it, I open them up with the sarcastic thought "It ain't no present unless you send me hard cash".

What followed was a true OMGWTF moment. They've sent me 10,000 yen (50 pounds) of vouchers! All as a reward for joining their fibre optic internet service! I wonder if they even meant to send me two sets... and it seems I can use the vouchers together, so YEAH!! Bic Camera RULES!

A week inside my head.

This week I have mostly been wearing T-shirts made of stretchy material, wide-necked jumpers and zip-up tops.

Because last week I was mostly in hospital, having blood tests, on a drip and having my ear cut open and fiddled with while I was still conscious.

Having an operation on your eardrum while you're awake is no relaxing experience. Obviously, with the anaesthetic it didn't hurt, but you can still feel all sorts of pushing and shoving and worse still hear everything. I can only describe it as being like the various types of noise you get when you're tuning a radio between stations, played directly into the middle of your head.

Then there were some other joyful surprises. I think probably to cauterise blood vessels as they cut the ear round the back and prise it open to make more room in the ear canal, they don't use a plain old scalpel but some kind of heat implement. In short, I was treated to the light smell of my own flesh being burnt.

The next surprise came when the doctor said "I'm now going to use a hammer and chisel to chip off some parts of the bone" - and I was subjected to repeated pounding of the skull. Again, there was no pain, just the surreal thought that someone was "sculpting" my skull while I was awake.

With my face hidden away under a little tent of blue gauze, one of the ways I tried to distract myself was to disassociate myself from the reality of what was happening. Rather than let myself imagine the bloody scene that was being played out only a few centimetres away from my eyes and brain, I tried to pretend something else was happening. The effect the anaesthetic had was to make the whole side of my head feel like a slab of stone had been laid on top of it, so I jut imagined the doctor carving out a relief into that piece of stone rather than my head.

All sorts of characters appeared on the pillow to my right (the way I was facing) acting out slapstick routines - Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Donald Duck, Mickey and Minnie Mouse (having a punch up), Elmer Fudd and Buggs Bunny, whole troops of elephants, giraffes and zebras rushing across African plains, marching bands, and even Kylie Minogue as the fairy she played in Moulin Rouge.

But in reality, they couldn't totally distract me from the absolute racket going on inside my head at times. At one point I thought I felt pain, but when I asked the doctor it turned out he was just firing an electric pulse into my head and it was making a muscle twitch. After that I just gave up on trying to imagine anything or distinguish between the different sensations, and at some point when they started to fiddle with the deepest part of the ear, it made me so disoriented and dizzy that I was grateful for losing my bearings.

A week later, I still have the packing in my ear, which makes me pretty deaf. That either comes out on Friday (together with the stitches) or in a couple of weeks, I'm not sure. Hearing takes a month or two to get back to normal. I have to have a CAT scan in a few months to check that there have been no complications. It will take six to twelve months for the nerves in my upper ear and around to regrow and for sensation to come back (at the moment it feels like senseless rubber). As the swelling inside the ear gradually goes down, by contrast it hurts more - the packing sponge inside expands and sends sharp shooting pains into my ear and neck once in a while. My ear is still ringing too, and I hope that stops soon.

I'm not making out that I've had heart surgery or a brain operation or anything truly debilitating - in fact I'm truly amazed that something that invasive can be done to my body and yet I can return to an almost entirely normal life again from the following day. My respect for doctors and nurses, who are so easy to take for granted, could not be higher. On the one hand this has been much less of an ordeal than I expected and asides from writing this post, I don't dwell on what it was like on the operating table. But on the other hand it has been a bit of an ordeal: it's the old case of not appreciating what you have until you lose it. With all these bandages wrapped around my head and ears after the operation, I wasn't even able to wear my glasses, reminding me of how blind I am as well - losing the better part of two senses in one go was a bit of a wake up call.

I don't mean that in a self-absorbed way. It struck me really hard afterwards that I had just received some of the best medical care this world has to offer, and yet 98-99% of everybody else on the planet doesn't have access to that. Maybe it's a mild form of survivor's guilt.

So, take care of yourselves.

Nikko

This weekend Emily and I went to Nikko, about two and a half hours North-East of Tokyo, where there are the most lavish shrines and temples in Japan. Despite it being a bank holiday, the most popular main shrine in the complex was not so crowded, and the shrines and temples off to the sides, which were in some ways much nicer places, were even pretty empty. The rest of Nikko was empty and we walked a lot through remarkably unspoiled countryside.

Although it's the middle of February and Nikko is at an altitude of about 550 metres, there was only a tiny residue of snow in one of the temples and in general it really wasn't cold. On Sunday we took the bus up to Chuzenji Lake, at around 1400 metres, which I couldn't help but think of as only one third of the way to Tibet, and my sweet baby Jesus was it cold! Icy wind with proper snow, yeeesh.

Luckily the Kegon Falls were slightly more sheltered from the wind, and by the time we got back down to Nikko it felt a lot warmer. The whole trip was a fantastic getaway from Tokyo, and while I have already been making a point of getting out and exploring the suburbs of Tokyo every weekend for the last month, now I really see the value in getting out of the city altogether. The landscape changes completely, you breathe fresh air and even if you walk yourself to exhaustion you come back into Tokyo feeling totally recharged.

I put up a Nikko photoset on Flickr.

Unholy Trinity

Strangely, my deceased laptop seems to have come back to life. I can't tell whether it was just sulking, hibernating, or if this is a full scale miracle and I should be contacting the Pope.

On the down side though, as predicted, my three year old iPod's battery is close to death. I frankly might as well use it as a home-bound music store and buy one of the smaller ones for my daily music needs (not that I'd be able to use it for a while anyway, since I'm having a my ear sawn off in two weeks.)

In the meantime, I'm giving you this (disfunctional) family photo taken the other day.

It's an ego, Spock, and not like any we've seen before.

What a shitty week. You know it's been crap when buying a hoover and do a big clean up of your apartment on a Saturday night feels like the most fulfilling thing you've done.

I wish I had the energy to make light of the stupid bitch of an artist I've had to work with this week, with her grandiose and completely untenable theories about the differences between how Asians and Westerners understand and interpret paintings... but I'm too tired and I just want to go to bed.

Love is in the Ear...

So, how will you be spending your Valentine's Day this year, Mr Moshi Moshi?

Having my ear operated on. Maybe I'll be lucky and the doctor will graft over my eardrum in the shape of a little heart.

Leather Bother

I have been delighted on my return to Tokyo to find that the sales are not over yet. Fearing that I would be picking over the remains of the clothes rejected by the rest of Tokyo's fashion-conscious inhabitants, I have in fact been able to score a number of hits.

One ongoing saga that my friends in Tokyo have been watching unfold was my relentless quest for a jacket.

What I wanted:
-A leather or sheepskin jacket that is warm but not necessarily as warm as my ski jacket, and not exorbitantly expensive.

What I found during my search:
-Nothing but exorbitantly expensive, paper-thin leather jackets.

Now there was no doubt that these leather jackets were works of art, and probably worth the amount that was being charged for them, but there's something disheartening about discovering that the average price of a leather jacket in Tokyo is around 400 pounds. The average price. Seriously, the leather is beautifully soft and all, but we're not talking about Armani or Prada here, so how can they charge that much?? Do the Japanese stroke their cows to death?

To cut a long story short, I worked my way through two jackets before getting to what I wanted.

While back in England, I went to Camden Market, where by the end of the day I must have seen about 500 new and second hand leather jackets. Out of all of those, I only tried on about three because all the others looked so fucking sorry that I didn't even want to take them off the rack. Finally, I found pretty much exactly what I wanted for 100 quid, new -- found at the very end of the day: the last jacket on the on the last rack of the last shop I went into, telling myself that I'll give up if I didn't find anything in there.

Back in Tokyo, I managed the seemingly impossible last weekend, when by chance I found a second hand sheepskin jacket that is exactly what I want for 50 quid! Couldn't believe it, since in Japan second hand shops are pretty few and far between to begin with, and when you do find them, they tend to be more along the lines of "expensive vintage", and given its good condition they could easily have charged 100 for it. Score!

After

The living space is about 50% bigger than my previous room.


Nicer floor, higher ceiling, bigger window.


A photo taken in the spirit of a Japanese interior design magazine.


Lots of closet and cupboard space built into the wall removes all clutter and makes the place feel even bigger.


Kitchen area is small but does the job

Before

I said I would post some pictures illustrating the before and after of my living situation. So here are the "before" pictures.

Now these pictures, taken soon after I moved in, show the flat looking something like immaculate, compared to the state I was complaining about so vehemently in the months before I moved out.

What you're looking at is relatively neat and tidy period that prevailed for about three months before my flatmate introduced the the hamsters, his girlfriend and other assorted piles of crap that filled up a further 30% of the living room.


My room: the culmination of 25 years of learning how to arrange the most number of things in the least amount of space (I had a small room throughout my childhood). The major challenge here was the total lack of closet cupboards (bar my flatmate giving me some of the space in his, next door). Hence the love affair with Muji storage began.


Now that I have a closet I can actually have my clothes out of sight and not hanging all over the place.


Clutterkitchen. Imagine this clutter extending to the rest of the room in the picture below and you'll get something like an image of the bric-a-brac shop I was living in in late 2006.




The miserable fish. Not long thereafter they were sidelined in favour of tall, conspicuous, rusty cages full of noisy hamsters.