Cybermartyr

Picture my Dad: born in 1940. Started using the internet in 1997. He was telling me the other day - gradually working himself into a rant as he was doing so - about how recently he's been getting two spam messages a day and there was no block function on his mail program. So what to do? He pressed 'reply' and wrote an email back asking them if they would kindly take him off their mailing list. Surprise and indignation ensues when spammage increases ten-fold.

More poetry

Dear Mr. R

I e-mail it many times, and I'm sorry.
I took business papers to have a person in charge of accounting of a university swing a salary of you a while ago now.

Then it was said to the person in charge that I wanted Mr. R　to confirm whether you acquired "an activity permit out of qualification" by the university where Ｍr. R belonged to if you was a foreign student. It was not said to seem to submit permit in itself, but it was to seem to take confirmation.

Do you take me?

---------------------------

Dear Mr. R

Thank you for giving an answer at once.

It was said that there was not a problem when I asked the person in charge of the accounting if Mr. R came in "working holiday visa".

I did credit of trouble.

Japan tends to be formal, and I am sorry to you.

I pay properly and consider your salary to be it in this.

Tokyo Random Walk

I went to a kind of art fair today, which the gallery was participating in. It was unusual: set in a plush hotel, and each gallery had a room with en-suite bathroom in which to display its work. Most galleries didn't make full use of the opportunity to do something new and unusual in a hotel space and just used the space like a regular gallery bar the odd bed and sink. But there were a couple of really atmospheric video projections in the glass shower cubicles and occasionally some inventive uses of bathtubs and beds as platforms for exhibiting art works.

It was in a pretty leafy riverside area of Tokyo, near my university campus and so afterwards I decided to do a random walk around nearby areas which I'd never been to and see where I ended up. Here's an image of the strangeness of Tokyo's urban landscape:


I wasn't entirely comfortable with having to walk underneath this colossal death-trap for the next five minutes.

But my random walk turned out to be amazing: one after the other I kept running into random places I'd been to just once before but had had no real idea of where they were in relation to the rest of Tokyo because I'd always gone there by tube. Two of the places were right around the corner from each other and I'd had no idea. Everything started to fall into place and it was like this epiphany or something. And then I came across this funky bookshop!


One of those days when fate likes to toy with you.

I never knew I had it in me.

Having temporarily run out of other things to put into Google, I decided to find out more about my mystical middle name. The overwhelmingly Jewish-related results further deepen my suspicion that there's something my parents aren't telling me.

"Dagan"

God of crop fertility, revered in West Semitic religions, including Canaanite and Phoenician religions. Dagan was a very central deity from around 2500 BCE until 1500 BCE, when many of his powers were transferred to his son, Baal. His name, "Dagan", was in both Hebrew and Ugaritic language the word for "grain".

Dagan was among the most important gods revered in cult centres as Ugarit, where he had an important temple. It appears that here he was for long periods of time second in the pantheon only to El. According to the Bible, he was also a very popular god in Asher, Gaza and Ashdod. He was known at other cult centres as Aliyan Baal.

According to the myths, Dagan was the inventor of the plough.

Well there you go! Get down on your knees and plough, mere mortals, for I am the God of crop fertility!

It Snow Tokyo!

After weeks of hearing about the blankets of murderous snow smothering the provinces, I was mostly quite happy that Tokyo wasn't being bogged down by this problem. But then secretly I was kind of jealous that we couldn't have our own winter wonderland here too. And then it suddenly snowed in Tokyo today!! And proper, fat inches of snow too! This is what I like about Japan, the weather mean business: when it rains, it rains - none of this drizzling misery that you get at the very least once a week in London.

So I went for a walk around the Yanaka area of old Tokyo that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.


Just around the corner from my flat.


A bit corny, I know, but still.


I've never experienced snow in Japan before. Right now I can't imagine a country which would feel more mysterious and magical than Japan in the snow.




Me.


Me in a previous take realising I had the camera on the wrong setting and walking back to reset it.


Relatively rare old building in Tokyo.




Chilly immigrant camel.

Don't. Just don't

For want of anything else to blog about, and since it seems to be all the rage, periodically I'm going to take on the role of fashion Nazi in the style of Vice magazine's uncompromising do's and don'ts feature. Except I imagine I will be focussing more on people's spectacular don'ts rather than their do's.


A note to foreigners in Japan: if you can't find your way out of a tube station here, don't worry, there'll always be an egg yolk mullet fairy with a head of golden fleece to lead you the way.


What the fuck are you, Mr Tibet on a backpacking holiday in Shibuya?


Just what you need to see when you've crossed the road, a garden knome retard striking its best nonchalant Estée Lauder pose.

Ceci n'est pas un hamburger

Photos from late Summer.

I just developed a film which has been sitting around for the last few months. Here are some of the shots from it:


This was the amazing sky over San Francisco as I saw it from the airport just before leaving. The black shape at the bottom isn't cloud, it's the thick, undulating fog which was creeping over the mountains like it was alive.


A pigeon feeding frenzy in Trafalgar Square like I've never seen. They were piling on top of each other to get at the food.


Hampstead Heath at dusk. "The Writer" by Giancarlo Neri, a giant table and chair about six metres tall. One of the best public artworks London has ever had.


The atmosphere of that evening was so calm and pure.


London's huge, open parks are something I really miss here.


Strangeness in arty East Berlin.

Watch this space.

One of the salient points of George Orwell's description of Big Brother in 1984 is that the Party was able to rewrite history as it saw fit. We have already seen this with the Iraq war, how Bush and Blair switched their justification for invasion from finding WMDs as the No.1 reason, to regime change and "liberation" as the main objectives. Now we're seeing it happen with Iran:

Aug 2nd 2005, Washington Post reports that the US National Intelligence Estimate predicts it will take another 10 years for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

Dec 27th 2005, Israel Insider quotes the Chief of Mossad, Israel's Secret Service as saying that it could be 2 to 9 years (2008-2015) before Iran has the bomb.

Jan 12th 2006, the BBC News Website reports that the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until about 2014; they don't have enough centrifuges.

Jan 16th 2006, the BBC News website quotes Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency: "If they have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization programme along the way, they are really not very far - a few months - from a weapon."

This is not exactly a scientific study of what's been reported in the media, but some of the articles on the first page of results from a Google search on Iran's nuclear capability. What's probably closer to the truth is that nobody fucking knows how close Iran is to producing a nuclear bomb, but since we need to consolidate control of the oil, then fuck it, let's bomb them anyway. And we certainly don't want to let them start trading in Euros instead of Dollars as they plan to do in March (see this article). The article even claims that Cheney has made preparations to attack Iran with conventional weapons and tactical nuclear weapons should there be another 9-11 style attack on the US. Even if Iran is not connected.

And the best thing about all this is that we can make it all look like it was their crazy leader's fault too. How convenient that the relative reformist Khatami is gone, we could never have pinned it on him.

I'm getting married!!

To my sofa-bed!! We only met two days ago and we've only spent two nights together, but it's love!!

It took ages to find the right one. Most were too big or of the few that came in single size, many just looked like wheelchairs which unfold into hospital beds...


Wheelchair


Hospital Bed


Unidentified Object for Hospital Use.


Stretcher

The Pied Piper of Pyongyang

I saw a guy who looked exactly like Kim Jong-Il at Shibuya Station today - same sticky up hair. I actually managed to get a photo and was gleefully going to upload it on this blog. But when I got home the memory card was saying "corrupted data" for that one photo... Now I'm thinking perhaps it wasn't a mere lookalike after all. North Korean secret agents must have been milling in with the crowd, using special transmitters to block cameras.

Well, for the time being I'll just have to use a picture from the internet.


Smooth Operator...

And here's another gem from the Onion.

Meet the Back Dorm Boys

Otherwise known as Asian Backstreet, these guys rule!

See them here and here.

Only in Japan...

do you get on a train and come face to face with a middle aged guy who's wearing a bright blue shellsuit, gold rings, Jackie O style big brown sunglasses, a white construction helmet, shocking pink lipstick and stinks of piss.

I so desperately wanted to take a photo with my cameraphone but in Japan you can't switch off the loud "click" sound, just so as to protect the modesty of young women and old men with pink lipstick.

富士山

I've never had a clear view of Mt Fuji from Tokyo until today. The air is only clear enough in winter. I went to the viewing deck on the 45th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building to get a look and again, like in the last picture I posted a couple of months ago, it was hard to believe that Mt Fuji is a big mama of a volcano. She was bashfully hiding behind a cloud for fifteen minutes before she finally came out to say goodnight.

The War on Convenience

And remember: absolutely no prining!

Let's biggu it uppu

The Japanese often take something very simple from the English language and develop it further than we have. Adverts for vitamin drinks aimed at salarymen who need something, anything to keep them alive through their excruciating working day, offer the chance to "pawaa uppu!" (power up). I've also heard of people taking a "steppu uppu" in their careers.

The other day I saw a sign by the roadside urging drivers to be attentive to one another, to "manaa uppu." I'd love to use this term when someone's speaking too loud on their mobile on the train back in London - "Manner up, biatch!"

I guess this "uppu" logic could be applied to the history of the Japanese nation: long periods of quiet followed by short bursts of turmoil, whether it be the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 or the rise to fascism by 1939/41. Ie, when things go wrong in Japan, they really fukku uppu.

Googlicious videos...

To make you laugh...

laugh some more...

gasp in wonder...

and cry in utter disbelief.

Sofa Monkey

Apparently the term "jump the couch" has officially entered US slang, meaning any unusual or OTT behaviour anyone is exhibiting. The term was born following Tom Cruise's notorious appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.

I challenge you to watch it. It's excruciating. Actually quite frightening. If anything, I am more freaked out by the audience's hysteria than Tom Cruise's ever increasing insincerity.

And here's an alternative version to ease your mind.

And to illustrate the unlimited pointless distraction on offer from google video, an alternative version of Madonna's Hung Up video.

If you go down to the woods today...

Being New Year, everything's shut here until at least tomorrow, so I've been at a bit of a loss for things to do outside because galleries and museum are all shut too. So I thought I'd take a walk in Yoyogi park today. "Yes that'll be nice and quiet," I thought. Oh no it wasn't, the whole of Tokyo had decended on Yoyogi park so as to visit the Meiji Shrine. And when I got there people were mostly leaving, walking en masse down the avenues of the park and caught up in this moving crowd I felt like I'd ended up on some kind of protest march.

Except why protest when you can spend money?! That's the genius of capitalist democracy! And the soothing female Japanese voice that eminated from the loudspeakers hidden in amongst the trees seemed to know this as it lulled people with soft calls of "coffee, tea, ramen, rice balls, cakes and sweets - why don't you come and rest your legs - we humbly await your custom."

I was in no particular rush, so normally I would have walked for as long as it took to get out. However, with making an exit now a priority, the park seemed to triple in size so as to keep me trapped within its leafy bosom for as long as possible. When I finally got out I was greeted by people with signs saying I should repent my sins to Christ. I wondered if eating at KFC and McDonald's three days in a row could be considered a sin, realised I'd now learnt the Japanese word for sin and content with that, moved on, sinful and unrepentant as ever.

Suupaa saizu mi

I got up late, past lunch-time and went out to find just about everything shut. I couldn't be arsed to look for anywhere else, so I went into McDonald's. I got lots of fries! Lots and lots! So many it wasn't even worth counting! And a Big Mac is something bigger than a medium-sized grapefruit. I know this is a disgusting start to the year 2006, but I don't plan to repeat it often. At least the food I eat this year can only get better from hereon.