All I can say is read this article about Pat Tillman. It's the summation of pretty much everything in America today. Politics, sports, celebrity, propaganda, the media, the war in Iraq... And it is tragedy from start to finish. For those international readers, Tillman walked away from a multimillion dollar contract to play professional sports to serve in the military. He was killed in combat and his death was elevated as he was a poster boy example of All American patriotism. Except that it turns out he wasn't exactly what they wanted him to be. He thought the war in Iraq was illegal. He was an agnostic. He read Chomsky. And he died of friendly fire and four years on his family still don't know what happened to him exactly and why his body armor and fatigues were burned after his death. It's a tragedy beyond belief, because he was so cravenly used as a piece of propaganda, and his life speaks of honor and nobility to a degree that really was impressive.

Right now the Tillman family have to contend with this from the man who handled one of the botched investigations into his death by friendly fire:

Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family's unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.

In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."

Gernsback, we hardly knew ye. This is one of the best finds I've come across in quite awhile, a blog called Paleo-Future which looks at outmoded and archaic visions of the future from our past. Absolutely mesmerizing. Check out this excerpt from the Orson Welles presented film of Future Shock. We've all got FUTURE SHOCK! Though I suppose the really shocking thing is that in the future Orson wouldn't get to light up in the airport.

Future Shock (Orson Welles Intro)
Uploaded by donaldtheduckie

I've been saving this one up all week, even though hardly anybody reads this damn thing on the weekend or Friday.



Irony free, wonderfull... NICE MAGAZINE! No, seriously I should start that.

Other bad ideas I had this week...

Solving the bee population crisis by starting mosquito farming. We could harvest the blood they collect! For blood banks!

Genetically crossbreeding pegasii and unicorns to create winged unicorns.

Going to the hospital with the flu.

A music video idea that begins with a music video director sittiing around trying to think of a music video idea.

Solving our oil dependency by creating America's first coal powered SUVs.

Realizing that the Apollo moon landing footage was faked... Because they did land on the moon, but someone forgot to take off the lens cap when they got there, so they had to fake it all later to make up for it.

And for my final bad idea... Next week I'm going to do "unequivocal love for things that are potentially embarassing week". (apologies and thanks to Catherine Kim). I bet it ends up being more embarassing for me than all of you.

Happy Friday...

Here's a collossally bad idea, one that has no peer or equivalent. It may be the height of bad ideas. A japanese television show called Tensai Shimura Zoo in which they send people to live with baby animals in a house. Like baby PANDAS and LIONS and BEAVERS and KOALAS. Packs of them. Unlike most of my bad ideas, this one somehow happened. Which begs the question, if every idea is thought of simultaneously by five people and only one capitalizes upon it - or so the phrase goes - does the same apply to bad ideas?

Bad idea week continues. Maybe it should become bad idea month. Please continue to share your bad ideas. But I'm after a certain quality of bad, a bad borne from overwhelming intense earnestness or smarts. A bad example would be Korean artist Nam Jun Paik's Robot K-456. Which would walk around, talk and poop beans. See that's actually clever so the bean pooping robot is not a good example.

Here's a wonderful new product for those of you who are sick of everyone you know having digital cameras...





Check out Flickrblockrs!

I am alive. I ended up being at the hospital until 7am. My fever was out of control. After tests all they could come up with is flu but the doctors were puzzled as there wasn't any flu going around. Except that I've come to find out a bunch of people I know are sick, too. Maybe some combination of the travel and the flood and all that wore me out where it's just hit me worst of all. In the past few days I've been a complete zombie. I remember being this sick once before, with bronchitis as an eight year old.

One of the great things though is that I have terrible sleeping problems and for the first time in months I've been sleeping for fun. Just lying down and sleeping cause I want to and enjoying being asleep, reveling in dreams. How'd I forget how to do that? It's been months since I did that. The funny thing now is that instead of water dreams, I'm having fire dreams. People hand me notes on paper that go up in a burst of flame right after I read them. Fever dreams. My good idea: sleep for fun sometime.

I'm in methodist hospital in brooklyn tonight. I have a fever of 102+ degrees and passed out earlier. I should be able to see a doctor in about three hours. It's always... Interesting up here. Film people take themselves so seriously, when I see what medical proffesionals go through I'm in awe and wonder how they get through a day.

One great thing about living three blocks from a hospital - four dollar ambulance rides in a cab. I had some good stuff to blog but I might need a few days...

Oh, here's a thought - everyone (and you can post anonymously) post a comment with your bad idea of the day. Mine? A movie called "Blood Weed" about conflict marijuana.
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Sometimes I pride myself on an awful idea. I like to come up with bad science fiction scenarios, like Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout. For instance: a short story about a man who can see into the future... Who is sent to the future in a time machine. I also come up with terrible ideas for art projects but I lack the skill to realize them. Right now I would like to do a series of Renaissance style, immaculately detailed and realistic paintings of animals like pandas and beavers and otters and other adorable critters doing ferocious faces as if they were terrifying creatures. Like in this photo I found:



Or maybe it's the fever talking. I've come down with a flu, or I've been breathing in awful air from the flood or who knows what. I was relating my travels yesterday and I realized that when we hit Australia a typhoon hit the northwest just above us, and right before we left for Japan there was an earthquake there, and then I get home and there's the second heaviest day of rainfall in NY recorded history. Let's hope I don't come to visit your part of the world. Even yesterday I was in Prospect Park playing catch with Anne and her friends and I almost beaned three kids who I swear came out of nowhere on a fluke. Eric and Martin may disgaree, having seen me play softball and turn into a human ski-doo ramp off a grounder once.

I do believe that the universe has a tendency to balance things out, in ways you might not even recognize. Or perhaps we attribute the meaning after the fact to decipher where there is none... But sometimes we see clearly, good out of bad. For all the weatherly woes and troubles, the flood did lead me to cleaning my apartment like it hasn't been in forever. Every stray speck of dust and hair, every reminder of the recent past, all completely gone. I've come home feeling new and inspired, and my home feels comfortable but new, again. I escaped the gravity of my own black hole. Watching Spring come alive in New York, walking out the door in just a tshirt has a loveliness of its own.

It was so gorgeous yesterday that I woke up with an incredibly sore throat and still went out for a bike ride and running around the park, thinking I'd power through the thing. I was supposed to go get dinner with my friend Rachel but after I got home I came down with a fever and my throat felt like a sandpaper bag filled with sour lemons and passed out. But I did get to spend a lovely afternoon in the park.

Random photos of late...


Cat who sticks its tongue out at people


Hideous santa doll found while art supply shopping with Anne. I bought a bag of plastic frogs and left them all over the subways.


Vasco, my executive producer's dog, the company dog at misterboomboom


When I work at the misterboomboom offices I like to work from the kids' playpen we built.

Something else I stumbled upon while doing research: a photo gallery by a guy named H.L. Tam. I have no idea who he is, just that his record of photographs of his travels are incredibly evocative and radiant. One of things I like most about his Tokyo sketchbook is that his Hong Kong based viewpoint discovered something I was looking for but didn't find in Tokyo; cracks in the firmament, the people who live on the margins, nocturnally.

His Tokyo Sketchbook in particular fits my memories of the place.

My favorite Japanese photographer remains Rinko Kawauchi, she being part of Foil with Nara and Yoichi Nagano.

In the final day of flood recovery and been writing like a madman on music videos lately. I want to implore you to see Hot Fuzz, which opens today. It's from the same creative team that made Shaun of the Dead and the brilliant and underrated British series Spaced. We saw it in Australia and Nick in Seattle and Mark and I in NY are going to see it again tonight. It's the best stupid fun I've had in a movie in aeons. It could've been far too arch and ironic, but instead it's somehow sweet (taking the homoerotic action movie subtext for all its worth) and disturbingly hilarious. The last twenty minutes alone are worth the price of admission, like watching some friends of yours amped up on early John Woo and Tony Scott movies play out all the action movie badassness that is actually fun, in earnest.

Here's an Edgar Wright made trailer for the Internet


And the official...


Happy Friday...

Insanity has never been known to respect any racial boundaries. The less said about this the better. Now's the immediate moment for all that collective soul searching and appropriate grief over a tragedy. But the issue of Cho Seung-Hui's Korean status and how it will affect the Korean American community is just depressing. Our 24 hour news cycle dictates the pressure to find any new scurillious tidbit to feed the news cycle, and the quest for ratings would drive a major news organization like NBC to broadcast his attention seeking rants is particularly dispiriting. I'm sure they had a long debate over whether or not to broadcast the material, one in which the phrase "ratings goldmine" was probably in the back of someone's head.

I don't remember Klebold and Harris being referred to as white or caucasian in their press coverage, or what backlash that would have on the white community. It's only when you are the alien other that this becomes important or an issue or a fact that determines meaning in an event that has none. And yet we all try to decipher it.

Even more sad is this: my half Korean friend Christina notes that one of Cho's victims is a Korean American. Read about Karen Mary Read right here. For all the coverage, I could only turn up two instances of this in the news, one a local report from where her mother lives, the other in the Chosun Ilbo. Granted, Mary was a half Korean like myself and Christina, but ultimately all it means to me is that irregardless of his race, someone psychotic did something hurtful to a lot of people without regard for race, and I wish they'd stop showing his face on television and mentioning he's Korean. Our memories are short. If you visit this link you'll read how we have a history of violence in schools back to Colonial times. The greatest single deadly attack on a school in America occurred in 1927. Psychosis doesn't respect what year it is.

Call him batshit insane, evil, what have you. I wish they'd talk about our fucked up gun laws, the glock he had costing $561. That's how much it costs to enable yourself to kill a lot of people; the gateway price from the psychotic's fantasy land remaining in their head and enacted in reality by will. I wish in fact they'd stop mentioning him at all. Just stop showing pictures of him, stop attributing his like for the movie Oldboy as some factor in what he did. If anything talk about the people who were killed and what their lives were about and who they were. Remember them.

This guy from Franz Ferdinand has some side project called Box Codax. He took the ubiquitious otter video I posted here before and composed an original song for it. I don't know what to say, other than I like the idea of artists composing original music for youtube clips.

I've turned on comments moderation, but the upside to this is that now anyone can post a comment here with or without an account, I believe. You can even do it anonymously. Let me know if it's working. And here's what I really want to post...

I want to share this, which I discovered doing some research for a video idea. Do any of you know what show this is from? I can't turn up anything on 009-1. This is my favorite opening title sequence ever. I love the girl who has a flamethrower while parachuting. I love the girl who looks like she's going to go for a nutshot while she's boxing. I'm in love with the girl on the motorcycle when she smiles after she like Evil Kenievels while shooting other motorcyclists and pauses to give such a cute smile. I want to watch this show, badly.

I'm doing allright. The giant New York storm sent several inches of water into my apartment from the backyard all the way into the front. On Sunday evening around 8pm I had cleared most of the water out and laid sandbags down; things were looking good. At 11pm I went back, opened the front door, and saw water rushing toward the front and gave up and went to bed. Lots to recover, I basically have to move back into my place and I have no idea what got damaged yet. Nick asked me if I took any rad pictures. Fuck no I didn't take pictures, I don't even know where my camera is right now. I threw everything valuable I own I had time to get into bags and threw them upstairs.

I've been spending all my time either cleaning, bailing water, moving things, or cleaning. It's been comically tragic. I had a bucket load of muddy water to dump in the utility sink in my laundry room and somehow the pipe had got separated from the sink, so all the muddy water poured right out of the sink onto the floor. Sisyphean. Yesterday I took some time off to go to the boomboom offices to write a treatment. One of the best things I could do. My producers Violaine and Stephanie had a playdate for their daughters in the offices. Bana, who's new to the company, and I built up their kiddie furniture. After becoming homeless and sleeping on a four foot long couch, it was really wonderful to be around some warm humanity. Later I asked Bana one of those silly questions you only ask when writing silly things 'Hey, Bana, you know good ways for people to die accidentally?' Bana, having grown up in Lebanon, not only had stories, they pointed out how trivial my playing with the concept was. She told me about a man who was on the beach running for his life from an artillery attack who got struck by lightning in the middle of it all. Something she saw with her own eyes. I could not have invented that.

She told me something about a concept in the Muslim faith that I thought was interesting: if you know someone who can see the future, even if they're right, don't trust them. I'm still pondering that...

I'll write more soon but blogging is hard to get to right now, if the rain doesn't go insane tonight I can maybe move back in tomorrow.

No blogging for awhile, I'm actually flooded out and homeless. My neighbors have been great though helped me get sandbags and carry things to high ground. The thing is... Its starting to rain again. Ill be ok.
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My apartment is two inches deep in water, flooding from the backyard. Uh oh....
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My editor and friend Rob Ryang is one of the best people I know. He's low key funny but he makes me laugh harder than anyone, which is always a big help when we're editing my far too serious videos.

Robert of course came to prominence for his Shining trailer which I post on a weekly basis. When it first was circulating through email through some filmmakers, I immediately wrote the email address at the end blindly telling them I wanted to work with them. The next day I read about Rob in the New York Times and thought, well fuck, I'm not going to get to work with him. A few weeks later I heard back and here we are, I haven't worked on anything without Rob since.

Strangest of all, he was recently featured on Al Jazeera. Yes, that Al Jazeera. Click here to watch Al Jazeera's story on trailer mashups and to see Rob's sense of style. Ahem.

I used to cut things myself and although I'm competent I knew that I had hit a limitation - I wasn't an exceptionally gifted editor. And I was tired of working in self imposed exile. I don't cut like Rob does, I tend to like to boringly hold on shots, and we have disagreements sometimes but I often defer to him when he makes his case. Rob is like a writing partner after the fact - he's just as important to my work as what I do.

Rob and I have that sick compulsion of remembering pretty much everything we see, and this little gem he captured himself on tivo as it happened.



And here's another overlooked work of Rob's - he was asked to recut indie films into studio films, so he took David Lynch's Blue Velvet and in some ways I think this is even better than Shining. Lynch saw this and was not happy about it all. Boo for not having a sense of humor.



-



There's a picture of the demolished, meteor stricken plastic chair in my backyard. Anyway, all I'm doing today is taxes and cleaning inside and outside and getting my bicycle fixed. Rode my bike in NYC for the first time in weeks and of course nearly get in a really bad accident due to a jerk driver. They purposely cut me off and nearly caused me to plow into a parked car. So I caught up with them to give them the finger and it was an elderly couple. Oops.



The other thing I had to do today was go get a real New York bagel, just one of those foods you can't get anywhere else. I used to hear New Yorkers talk about how bagels are different here, and have heard various silly theories such as how there's flouride in the water here. Now that I live here I know what they mean. Even bad bagels are chewy and don't have that crumbled sour thing that bagels on the west coast do. I no longer eat bagels outside of NYC unless it's catering on set and I have no other options. This here is from La Bagel Delight and if you click on the link you can read an excerpt of Paul Auster's novel The Brooklyn Follies in which the place features. It's considered by some to be one of the best bagel joints in the city, despite it's ludicrous name. A Thai man is their secret weapon, hand rolling every bagel at 4am, which is why you see it twisted. Some of my best memories of Brooklyn involve me cycling up to that place at 6am when they're hot as they hand them to you.

But I really miss Tokyo ramen joints, myself. I could wax poetic on the layout design of my favorite one in Shibuya, maximized for pure efficiency with ramen I have never ever tasted in the US... And it's probably not even that high quality. Getting food like that at 1am is much appreciated by an insomniac and fan of the midnight snack like me.

Here's a link to what I think has to be one of the best videos of this year, Patrick Daughters' latest for Feist. I was hoping to write on this, but now I am just humbled into silence and appreciation. Patrick has so many amazing videos already to his name, but this is his best in a long awhile.

Watch it here.

It's amazing how much he invokes with less rather than more.

I can't post videos though, without sharing more Nagi Noda.



and I am still in awe of the use of birds here...



_

Working and cleaning and fixing things, been gone for so long, so much to do.

Good morning, it's 2am and I just woke up.

My breath smells like mustard gas and roses.

I have become unstuck in time.

I just read that Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

Here's an even better obituary at the NY Times

Kurt Vonnegut was a dark humorist and fantasist, a clear moralist, someone who could make the inherent tragedy of the human condition sadly funny. He lived through the firebombing of Dresden in World War II as an American soldier. With that experience he became a devout humanist, one of the most clear headed people to point out our flaws as a species.

When I was twelve I read Galapagos in an attempt to impress an older girl, my sister's friend. I didn't really want to read it. Up to that point I read only science fiction and fantasy, and likewise only listened to classical music. But puberty and girls, that heady cocktail, had me at age twelve scrambling to try all sorts of things. Reading Vonnegut for the first time was a crucial, defining moment for me. It had the imagery and ambition of science fiction and fantasy, the surrealism, but none of the cliches. It was a book narrated by a ghost a million years in the future, watching over humanity who had solved all its problems by evolving into seal like creatures. It was surreal, funny, dark, sad; all often at the same time. But its sense of humanity never seemed surreal. It seemed even more true despite the liberty it took with reality. My mind finally opened up, and that's when I started to really discover books, any book. And from there an interest in everything.

His books always make me want to laugh, kill myself, and save the human race from extinction, all at the same time.

From Mother Night: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

And more of his wisdom.

He often joked about dying and wanting to die. All I know is that there will be no more depressing jokes from one of the greatest writers this country ever saw, easily on par with Mark Twain. As he said:

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

And so it goes.
Poo-tee-weet.

Coming back into New York. One last final flight. This time barely noticable due to all the endless momentum. I sometimes wonder what so much forward motion may affect on the body and mind, as we weren't born ready to travel so fast and so far. Jet lag is the feeling of your soul having been left behind, needing to catch up. Mine is in Tokyo. In Seattle I said "shimasen" instead of excuse me to various people. Everything confuses me down to what side of the street cars are on.

Usually when I come back to New York as soon as I hit my neighborhood I get such a warm feeling, love for my home. But this time it was subdued. Part of my soul is stuck in Japan. I'm happy for it and need it to come back, but I think I have to get back there to pick it up someday.



It's just such a radical shift. My cabdriver tried to screw me over and took various wrong turns and added to the fare. Three times he started driving away from the direction we needed to go. It's the kind of thing you have to watch out for in New York all the time. In Japan there's a tacit acceptance for the most part where any small job is done properly. I'm sure it puts enormous strain on people, but I appreciate it so much.

More than that I met such amazing people on this trip. I'm annoyed I can't just call them up and say hey let's go meet in the East Village. Thank you strangers, I now consider you friends and miss you already.

I got home and discovered that...

My Powermac G5 is broken and won't turn on. Apple says it's fucked and I just went out of warranty two weeks ago.

I left this apartment a much bigger mess than I remembered.

In my backyard, a plastic lawn chair has been shattered into fragments and there are traces of dark black and silver and pitch all over it. I'm convinced a meteorite struck it. That's the easiest explanation I can come up with.

This is very puzzling. I just want to come home and go to sleep but I feel odd, as if someone's been in here. Unsettling. And even though I know no one has, these are little odd mysteries. The G5 was fine when I left it unplugged. There's a lot of work trapped in that machine.

So now I can't sleep, and I'm doing work instead.

But for all that there is a good thing to come home to.



The stray cat remembered me and was at my backdoor five minutes within me coming inside. She won't let me pet her, like when we first met, but it was good to see her and she seemed happy to see me and she's sitting in the doorway right now looking at me. That's home.

One last Tokyo Story...

So one morning Nick and I get up, and we're fairly hungover. I want noodles and broth - hunting for ramen. Nick eschews it for a simple apple.

I'm told that it's fairly uncommon in Japan to eat or drink at the same time as walking. It's just one of those cultural differences. I don't know if it's true or not, though I have to admit despite seeing vender machines everywhere (I call them vender now forever and always thanks to the sign in our hotel pointing to the vender machine), I rarely saw people walking with coffee in hand and so on.

So Nick gets this beautiful softball size apple. And we're walking down a drag in Shibuya and Nick is chomping away. There's this guy standing in the middle of the street, a recent graduate of the too cool for school school for the cool. It's more in his attitude and body language than anything. And he sees Nick, points and gets a shit eating grin on his face and says "GENKI GAIJIN!" This guy was so happy to see a blonde dude walking and eating an apple he was happier than Nick was eating the apple.

Every day I walked through Shibuya I'd see this guy standing in the middle of the street, trying to look cool. On the last day i thought, fuck it... So I walked up to him and made apologies and asked him if I could take his picture cause I was from New York and thought he was stylish. He got all shy. Then his Brazilian friend convinced him to do it, cause I was from New York.



Then they got all into it and wanted their homies to get in, too.



So that's the guy who was happy to see Nick eat an apple.

_

I spent a day in Seattle to visit my family, as I rarely see them any more. Or tried to. I was assaulted by the most hardcore jetlag I've ever suffered, so the first day in Seattle I slept and then was wide awake through the night in a hotel room. Odd way to decompress. No matter how nice a hotel room is there's something about the inabillity to open a window and that strange hiss of climate control that always reminds you that home is far away.

Here's my little sister Heather and her friend Mary, celebrating Mary's 28th birthday with dinosaur stick on tattoos. I got a Spinosaurus, which hasn't washed off yet two days later. Maybe it's permanent.



Heather once played in The Gossip way back when. These days she's in law school and doing installation art.

My older sister Arie just bought a house with her boyfriend. This really blows me away. One of us has become an actual homeowner. I'm very happy for her.

I took two showers in one night in the hotel, just running hot water over me and thinking. My body is a mess. I lost a ton of weight on the trip, and gained some strength from being in the ocean so much... But three and a half weeks of flying, eating nearly every meal in restaurants, has left me drained and my skin breaking out in zits like a teenager. I haven't slept for more than four hours in one go in weeks. There has to be a way to travel like this and not fuck your body up. It's probably got something to do with not flying United across the ocean.

But my mind is in really good shape. Energized, illuminated, having learned many things, and answered some big questions I've had lately with even bigger, better questions.

So now I really am leaving Tokyo, bags packed and all.

Last night I got to meet up with Nagi Noda, after all. Visit the link to see her work from bearbricks to handpanda to her films and videos. She had just come back from Angkor Wat.

I can't think of a better way to spend my last night here, in the presence of someone I respect so much, honored to meet them. Sometimes that make me too shy but I discovered as she would say "human to human" that despite our difficulties in language I met someone who is a kindred spirit. I work very alone and so it was amazing to meet someone in another culture who has some of the same feelings about filmmaking, or how to put ideas together.

So here's the last thing from Japan, and I explain too much on this blog, and Nagi has made me promise I will never explain this. it's a secret. But it's my first piece of original artwork from her so this is getting framed on my wall back in Brooklyn. This says everything.

Saturday night with Rie.

My good friend Anne, sometime contributer to Giant Robot, often times smartest and funniest person I know, suggested I go hang out with Rie, who used to intern at her company Vertical in New York.

She took me to eat in Ginza. On this trip, I lost literally about 15 pounds while I was being active in the ocean nearly every day in Australia. I think I gained it back in five days in Japan. Food here is tremendous. I've been having people order for me, to just dive in. I don't think there's been anything I haven't been amazed by.

Rie studied women's studies at UCLA for a year, and it was very interesting to get her take on feminism especially in regards to modern Japanese society. On the train she pointed out two girls who were dressed like models or something, and said that's how modern Japanese girls feel the pressure to dress up for college. She was really happy to go to the library in UCLA not feeling the need to dress that way. And her observations on UCLA grade point average obsession was funny.

Ginza is in Rie's own words, the fifth avenue of New York. Very similar but the Japanese reliance on beautifully powerful signage adds a lot. But it's not my kind of place.



Afterwards she took me to the end of the Ginza line, to Asukasa. We got there way too late, but it made it better perhaps.



In Asuksasa there is a market but when it's closed all the shutters close and reveal paintings. The particular atmosphere and texture of the place was gorgeous at this hour. The temple nearby empty and silent. I am so glad I got to see this before I left, and an unusual hour. The place felt submerged, dreamy.






This is not a miniature from my favorite Gamera movie. But it looks that way.




Turns out all these gorgeous paper lanterns are pasted with corporate sponsorship.


The best picture I took in Tokyo.

During my trip here I keep asking people where the bad parts of Tokyo are. If you love something you must know the good and the bad; I don't want to see sleaziness, but how a city treats its immigrants and poor can say something about a city. But everyone I've asked has been puzzled by this; because there isn't that much, nor is there a Japanese equivalent for ghetto, really. But wandering at random we came into a part and suddenly realized we were in... A bad part of Tokyo.

The homeless here construct beds for the night out of cardboard that are incredible feats of engineering. But I felt too bad to take any pictures, and we returned to Shibuya.


Barber shop poster.


Rie is scared of heights but braves my hotel elevator. She's pretty tough.

Everyone here says their English is bad but I feel so awful that I cannot speak in their language and it's amazing how many people say their English is bad but I have had very deep conversations about many complicated things. I feel bad only because I misunderstand sometimes. But it works, with patience and empathy.

My favorite memory of the night; cherry blossoms raining petals again, and gracefully without hesitation Rie caught one in her palm. I tried and couldn't do it.

Leaving Tokyo today...

Don't want to.

_

Saturday went to Akihabara on Yuko's advice to find nerd nirvana. Akihabara is nerd Las Vegas crossed with open air comic con. From the train we could see buildings with four stories of cosplay costumes. The moment we stepped out of the train station we saw, for real, a girl dressed in a schoolgirl outfit being photographed by twenty sweaty old men. For real.



In all honesty... I have a problem with certain aspects of stereotyping a culture, or fetishizing it. For example, if I ever hear from a hipster about the vending machine that sells teenage girls' panties ever again as an example of their deep knowledge of Japanese culture - when it's pretty much the only story they know - then I am going to give them a pair of my used underwear. Or the idea that some American anime fans (and I say this as an anime fan) have that everyone in Japan to a single man woman and child watches Neon Genesis Evangelion. In all honesty, the problem with Akihabara is that it makes some of this stereotyping true.

Fetishization seems to be part of the Tokyo experience. In Akihabara it's the modus operandi.

It's the mega ultra nerd wet dream. Gadgets, girls in costumes, stores that specialize in DVDs, games, and manga, and toys. And not a child to be seen anywhere.

I went up to the 6th floor of a Japanese toy store looking for Nick and stumbled upon this...



An entire floor of the store devoted to replica guns. But not just guns. Replica scopes, silencers, ammo clips, gear bags, BDU vests, helmets... The place looked like a goddamn armory, all made of plastic. And I mean everything was accounted for, everything to fake brass gunmetal polisher.

Needless to say, I flipped out and spent more money than I should have on nerd haul. Including this, my new favorite toy. Sorry Ryan Castro, but I can only fit one in my bag... Diecast metal, transforming, fully poseable Gunbuster.



I must be kept away from Akihabara. After two hours nerd fatigue set in and we split. It actually became overwhelming.

On Friday we took the Shinkasen to Kyoto. Time to see something else, some different part of Japan. Despite having never been here, one misconception I hear regularly is the idea that all of Japan is like Shinjuku, all neon and steel and Blade Runner.



I wanted to see something else and watch the landscape pass by, the spaces in between cities. Someday I'll get to Kanazawa and Hokkaido, and Kyoto is not exactly the countryside, but different.





The Sakura festival was on, and the cherry blossoms in full bloom just starting to fade, raining petals. Kyoto was so crowded, the only walk possible a little shuffle. I'd never seen anything like this, the sort of Japanese equivalent of a fairground. Kids on school break laying out tarps and getting ready to have parties after the sun went down. In the temples we walked and made multiple wishes and prayers.







But more importantly, it was a chance to visit my friend Yuko.



Yuko was an exchange student in my high school in Puyallup, Washington. My senior year I took Japanese and she helped the teacher with the class. Despite language barriers, she was one of the few people at that age who shared an interest in a whole world I wanted to see and I inhabited to escape from small town blues. One of the reasons I was so obsessed with movies, especially foreign films from anywhere, is it offered a window to me, stuck in that town, to see the rest of the world, which I hungered for. Finally in Yuko I could talk to someone about everything else I had little passions for. I instantly had this massive crush on her, probably the biggest crush I had in high school, but back then I was so painfully shy about girls I liked that I would sort of hide from her.

This is funny, but at the same time serious: I always felt so bad for the exchange students who had to come to our town, which was narrow minded and offered little. I mean seriously, you come from a place like Amsterdam or a seaside town in Japan and get stuck in a woodsy suburb that has a Country and Western fair as its biggest attraction and a local Ku Klux Klan chapter. Our town had just started to turn into the strip mall of the area, and I remember a Yugoslavian girl - who back home had a civil war going on - telling me that the town had more parking lots than actual places.

The sad part is I could've spent much more time with Yuko, and I didn't. Soon after I graduated and went to Ireland and I remember the last day of Japanese class and knowing I'd miss her and not doing anything about it because of shyness, which was actually cowardice.

Five years or so later I returned home and my mom gave me some mail. One of them was a letter from Yuko sent five years before. That still strikes me as funny that my Mom sort of forgot about it for five years. I still have it. This was before you could see Miyazaki's movies in the US and she had cut out pages from a movie magazine of images from his films.

But now things have changed, and we don't really remember life before the Internet and gadgets, and she found me over the Internet, and I do the same thing sometimes, googling people I miss and didn't stay in touch with. I have come to honestly face that a large part of expatriation is running away from something.

And I got to see her. It's hard to catch up with someone when you have a few hours with them and it's been thirteen years since you last saw each other. But we were still able to make each other laugh and talk about things we like, like building Gundam models and what movies we love and samurai. We got a Keroro mask and goofed around.



As dusk hit a horde of photographers staked out the biggest tree. It looked and felt like a red carpet premiere.



It's hard to have such limited time, but I am glad we got to have a day in Kyoto, seeing each other after such time and space. Again, that feeling of the astronaut who travels at the speed of light and returns home and more time has passed for the rest of the world. But Yuko doesn't look a day older. 13 years ago feels like yesterday.

If there are old friends you miss, you should look them up.



The Shinkasen is the most amazing train I've ever been on, a gliding wraith that feels weightless. On the train ride home I thought about all the memories I have of Yuko and watched the harvest moon, three quarters full, hovering over the ocean and watching it's reflection ripple in the sea. And then I had to start working on another treatment...

-

The next day we went to the park in Tokyo. Wandered Harajuku and deeper into Shibuya.

They say Central Park is the greatest park in the world, and maybe it is in sheer numbers - how much space it takes up and so on. But the park here blows it away. It's just gorgeous.


Shibuya in the day


Gate of the park


Charms


votive boards. so moving. wishes both earnest and kind and some sad and eloquent in such a small space, in so many languages. everyone really just wants peace.


The one I wrote on. It's there, somewhere.


Crazy girl being crazy in Harajuku.


Top of Harajuku


Back towards the park.


Nick finds a store made for him.


Street art near NHK tower.

I was thinking for some reason of this last night while I lay spinning in my bed. Or the bed was spinning. Not sure.

Agrippa a poem by William Gibson.

It was originally a limited edition print run of a series of photographs that when exposed to light would start to fade to nothingness over time, and the poem was encoded on a floppy disc that ate the code as it was read line by line, so once it was read it was gone forever.

The final parts of the poem are about as eloquent and beautiful writing I can imagine regarding leaving home for the wider world.


They tore down the bus station
there's chainlink there
no buses stop at all
and I'm walking through Chiyoda-ku
in a typhoon
the fine rain horizontal
umbrella everted in the storm's Pacific breath
tonight red lanterns are battered.

laughing,
in the mechanism.


-

Thanks to everyone for putting me in touch with so many locals. Going to meet up with some cool people thanks to all of you.

First impressions of Tokyo.

i
love
tokyo
something fierce.

I want to live here someday.

-

I know it has difficulties and impenetrabilities and lack of Japanese language would be a major stumbling block, but there is something texturally and atmospherically radiant about the place. I tell people who have an interest in visual things that they must scuba dive because of what they will see. I feel the same way about Tokyo.

Impressions.

As we came into the city the most ominous urban storm front I've ever seen rumbled over the infinite geometry of Tokyo's buildings. Every place has for some reason its own quality of light, and we rode into Tokyo under a flourescent green and grey sky and the heaviest rain I've ever seen. What I saw I know is the result of many confluences and cannot be seen anywhere else.

We're at the Shibuya Excel hotel and our views look right down on that famous crosswalk in Shibuya, watching pedestrians ebb and flow like waves.

Vending machines and ticket systems keep social contact clean and simple. All the awkwardness of interaction when dining is easily dodged in this city if you're somewhat socially neurotic.

In a serious otaku haven of wall to wall manga and toys that left Nick and I speechless in its nerd overdose factor, a drop dead gorgeous woman stands in front of a display case of Blythe dolls under lock and key. Staring. Unmoving. For an eternity.

Bad fast food ramen here is better than any you'd get anywhere in New York. Manna from heaven esepcially after so many flights.

Shopping here seems to be really important. In Tokyu Hands the costume department was booming with business. Maybe some holiday is coming I don't know about. Another gorgeous girl slowly goes through all the fake moustaches.

A lot of people know more English than they let on. I'm not entirely sure what just happened in the hotel elevator, but an American confused by the thing made some small talk about his confusion. After he left, a Japanese girl turned to me and said something in Japanese quoting him and giggled away. I'm pretty sure she was mocking him. I'm in disguise here and unfortunately can hardly understand a thing anyone is saying.

Somehow we found a bar last night and intending to have a quiet one next thing we knew I was legless, drinking far too much with a Canadian metal band whose name I cannot and probably will never remember despite their good company and a pack of kogarus. For those seeking random experiences, Shibuya is a nebula of them.

I also sense some odd sense of danger here. That the city is engineered to keep loneliness at a certain level if you fall that way. That you could get lost forever.

I don't know how to write, at the moment, of what it is here that moves me so. I know that walking here in the bath of neon and flourescence and the beautiful people, men and women so striking, I feel something sublime and wordless.
_

I was going to meet up with fellow director Nagi Noda here, but she is headed to Angkor Wat the same time I am here. But I am going to interview her about her work hopefully in New York soon and will write it up here. She directed the Yuki video for Sentimental Journey I posted previously which I think is one of the greatest videos ever.

_

We had an overnight layover in Singapore.

Singapore vibes me. Not to offend an entire nation based upon mere hours spent in it, but there's something decidely off about the place that sends me a twitching. I remember this Wired article by William Gibson about the place. We were stranded in the airport for hours between our connecting flights, and at a low point Nick decided to wisely find a hotel nearby even though we only ended up sleeping there for two hours.

I wandered for awhile. The only thing I found open so late at night was a stand selling fake Prada and Gucci, dominated by girls dancing in the open air of the closed outdoor shopping arcade to Beyonce and Shakira. Signs for "Wanko" and "Bite Me" and "No durian allowed here". Stray cats in alleyways prowling about.

American Idol runs on their tv stations. Sanjaya is a point of controversy here.

Our cabdriver said "It's a dictatorship, but a great one. We're all happy here."

I am happy to be in Tokyo right now.

_

Small favor to ask: I'm headed to Japan and one thing I'm a little worried about is my lack of any Japanese language proficiency whatsoever. I obviously like talking to people and getting their sense of their place, and want to see Japan from the point of view from peers around my age who live there who work as artists or writers or designers or just straight up good people. If there's anyone you think would be up for showing me around a little bit, tell them dinner and drinks are on me.

Likewise, as of late a lot more people are reading this blog than ever before, and I know that blogger doesn't make it easy to anonymously say hi and I haven't had much time to respond to comments. I've had a lot more time to write lately and it's been helpful for me to write up what happens here, getting back in touch with my more restless youth when I used to write every day, needed to write every day. I'm even going to do an interview here with someone and if it works out keep doing that... Not sure exactly what blogging is but I'm getting comfortable with it. I even just heard from one my best friends I haven't heard from in years thanks to this. In any case, if you are one of those complete strangers who's reading, drop me a line sometime and let me know if I'm being overindulgent, or boring, or interesting, or what have you, and if the travel writings are something you'd like me to continue doing.

info(at)otaku-house.com

swap out the (at) for @

One of my favorite things about diving in Monterey was the presence of the world's last population of sea otters. Getting to swim with these animals made all the cold, low visibility, confusion of the kelp forest worth it. Along with red pandas and wombats nature owns Sanrio in the kawaii department.



-
Packing for Japan. Maybe going down to the beach one last time. Right now content to do laundry and organize and think about the next leg. I am physically shattered, the bruise on my side has hardened to a great lump, my ribs are sore from hauling myself onto the rescue boat, my pinky is sliced open from coral like you wouldn't believe, my fingertips are cut up from the same, I'm still stingy from sunburn and I'm generally sore all over. It feels good; sometimes getting hurt reminds me you're alive and not just a brain in a chair. A day off to appreciate it then..

30 feet underwater in Perth, Australia. Just off Rottnest Island. It's strange what you think about while diving sometimes. A lot of the time you're devoting a lot of mental energy to just maintaining - position in the vertical water column, where you're headed, how hard you're kicking or shouldn't be kicking, how much air do I have left, is my mask filling with water, do I need to equalize, what was that over there, where's my partner, is this horribly dangerous and something could go wrong?

But there are moments I've had on every single dive I've ever had in my life where that just stops, some little spots of zero gravity bliss or certain confluences of light and movement through water or coming face to face with alien life in its own environment, and I am utterly elevated into a state of being that is completely unnatural and yet feels like the most natural thing in the world. Walking never feels this good. I get those moments today. And yet... 30 feet underwater in the Indian Ocean on the other side of the world, for some reason at some moment, I think about my cat back in New York.


6pm in melbourne, just about to leave the South Pacific for the airport

Got in at midnight off the plane, went straight to Rosco's to sleep. Woke up 6 hours later and was at the docks half an hour later. I'm exhausted. Now I know why DAN recommends not diving immediately after a flight (flying after diving is right out due to pressure issues. I used to have to drive along Highway one to get back to San Mateo from Monterey after dives because the elevation cutting back to the 101 would be dangerous). At the moment, here on the dock, stepping onto the dive boat, I'm excited. Christmas morning excited. This is usally how I am on dive days until five seconds before I jump into the water. I'm excited by the fact that the boat is run by a captain named Ron, making him Captain Ron. And he's fixing the engine. Despite my bad luck with vehicles lately, Captain Ron fixes it in no time, just like I imagine the titular Captain Ron would. We're off, headed to Rottnest Island, sold as a destination of beautiful untouched beaches. All we're hitting up there is the dive shop to pick up our gear, then back out.


now in the indian ocean 12 hours later, leaving dock at 8.30am

The ride out is choppy and bumpy but puts me in high spirits. Whitecaps and swells dominate the surface of the water. I rarely get motion sickness. My trick is to stay on my feet and to go with the motion of the boat as relaxed as possible. I climb up top and take in the big blue. I'm always envious of people who got to grow up so close to the ocean and on boats and have that water mammal sense of being at sea. Everyone has their particular places that resonate. Mine is out here. I don't think I've ever gotten over my first conscious glimpse of the ocean, how unbearably powerful it was.


choppy sea on our way to dive


finally see an albatross with my own eye. so unbelievably beautiful and lonely looking. awestruck. all I got was this fleeting photo.

Introductions made on the boat. A bunch of Irish lads are on, and after I show them my knowledge of obscure Irish accents we're all friendly and in good spirits. My partner and I team up with a guy who says he's local and has 65 dives under his belt and knows the area. I suggest we team up as he's on his own and he can lead us on the dive.

This becomes important later on. The cardinal rule of diving is the buddy system. You have partners, you look out for each other, and you stick with each other. You check each other's gear. Your life depends on this. If your equipment fails its your buddy who's going to lend you theirs. I've had bad luck before. Diving at certain levels is easier than it seems and not that dangerous, but you never know. I once had a partner I didn't know who told me I was good to go and when I jumped off the boat and was supposed to bob like a cork, I didn't. The purge valve on my vest was stuck open, meaning it wouldn't fill with air to keep me buoyant on the surface. The biggest enemy of diving is panic and most accidents occur on the surface. I admit I panicked like a motherfucker that time but held it together and fixed things.

We arrive at the island, get our gear, and head to the first dive spot. Conditions are not ideal. Cold winds on the surface, lots of surf, and now we're close to rocky shore. I trained in Monterey, so I'm used to cold water and bad visibility. I'll dive in anything. Anchors dropped, we go. As cautious and dedicated as I am I always get nerves in those few seconds on the back platform, all the gear on, about to jump into the ocean weighing a lot more and completely awkward with flippers and weights and a puffed up vest. Plunge... Bob up, and all that weight feels like nothing now in the water. Nerves go.

Visibilty is poor and there's a strong current. The girl I'm diving with has less experience than I but has her act together. The divemaster tells us where to go once we hit bottom and to stick to that course because of the strong current today. Our leader sets us off. We tail him.



Pretty soon it becomes obvious we're having problems. He's never stopping to check on all our air. People use air differently. Women tend to use air a lot better. The trick is knowing when at the midpoint the heaviest air sucker is halfway down so you need to head back as it's a lot easier to swim underwater back to the boat. Now he's not bothering to look back at us, ever. It becomes an underwater race to keep up with him as the path he's taking is random and erratic and he's diving into extremely narrow crevasses. We try to communicate with him using hand signals but he doesn't pay any mind.

About 30 minutes into the dive we're in a bad spot. I can't see the girl anywhere. I'm sticking really close to him, looking down every which way to spot her. The next thing I know my face is in the air and I'm on the surface. And a really powerful wave knocks me wearing 100 pounds of gear onto a shallow flat of reef on my hands and knees. I think for a moment that I should take out my regulator and go to snorkel to save air when I get pounded by another wave. I don't have enough depth in the water to swim and it's taking all my strength not to get knocked over and rolled. I know for certain that if I stay on the surface in this spot I'm in big trouble. The exertion means I'm sucking air like crazy, and I'm worried about my group. With all my strength I push off the reef and shove myself to open water and kick like a madman against the rip of the waves and current. I'm clear. I inflate my vest and she surfaces close to me and she's keeping herself together but I can see she's worried in her eyes, too. Last we saw of him he went into another reef crevice. We wait a minute. Now we can survey and we are in a bad spot far from the dive boat with a lot of current between us and it. I give him another minute to surface.

The buddy system goes like this: if you are separated, surface and find each other there. It's an absolute rule.

Now a Marine Park Ranger vessel comes near. Our buddy doesn't surface. For the first time in diving I wave, which means "not ok". The Rangers come as close as they can and we swim over. I get to practice a new drill - taking off my gear in the ocean and handing it up to the rangers before hauling myself onto the boat like a beached seal face first. They're worried, and he surfaces, on the other side of the waves in a really bad spot. My partner is furious.

-

We all get back on our own boat. He comes in last. My partner wants to deck him. As he climbs on he doesn't say anything. She yells at him over navigating us to danger. I say, "I know you're not a bad guy, but we put our trust in you and we cut short the dive we paid for out of concern for you. When you didn't surface we called for the rescue. An apology would be nice." He doesn't apologize. Just shrugs. Captain Ron and our divemaster tell him he's off the boat and banned from it for life. I feel bad for the guy because I don't think he intended to hurt anyone. But he's got the kind of mental attitude that leads to accidents. A lot of diving is attitudinal.

-

Like I wrote before, panic is the worst enemy. You flicker in diving from grace to awkwardness, some internal sense suggesting you were not meant to be this way. Maybe a deeper mammalian part of the brain remembers our home is the water and all our life came from there, and that's where the bliss comes from. And as I also wrote a few days ago, like all things involving the water it fascinates me to understand that you must give yourself up to it. Panic is the enemy because it makes the water panic. Grace leads to flowing with. Sometimes the best thing to do in a strong current is relax totally, and let the surge pull you for a moment before sending you on your way.

-

If I could find a way to express through some means just what an overwhelmingly comforting sensation the ocean gives me, I'd be able to stop this compulsive desire to write and make films and so on. It's some cross between butterflies in my stomach and being silenced in awe to the sensation of looking into someone's eyes and seeing comfort reflected.

Takeshi Kitano once said this in an interview I can't find: "...I do love the sea, but at the same time, something inside tells me to keep a distance from it. We all know our origin is in the sea and it feels to me as though Mother Nature is calling us home. But on the other hand... we know we no longer belong there."

Some of us try, though.

-

Our second dive went much, much better. Still a little tough against the currents, but we did a lot of swimming through caves through the reef. Just wonderful. Say bull rays and curious fish and the reef here and just a good sense of camraderie between all the divers. We decided to stick together as a group due to the morning's events and our underwater mob felt better for it. It's easier to write about drama on the high seas, but again faced with the wonderful part I am at a loss for words. Those moments of bliss were far more frequent - hovering over sea grass that would flatten with each pat of my fins, gliding through the caves on currents looking at a subterranean world I couldn't have imagined, and the beauty of the light waiting on the other end. Sitting on the bottom and looking straight up at what divers call "god rays" - the slivers of light that stream down through the eddying water from the sun. When it was time to surface I was frustrated. I wanted to go back. But we'd hit our depth and time limits for the day. Me and one of the Irish guys made pains to be the last back into the boat.

On the boat ride back the chop was even more brutal. Our gang went up top, laughing and worrying a little over the feeling that we were on the world's biggest jetski. At one point Capt. Ron wasn't even behind the wheel and the boat was rocking back and forth from port to starboard, thudding against heavy waves that lapped over the boat and sprayed us head to toe.

We traded travel stories. We stared up at the sky and out across the ocean all around us. Remarked upon its beauty, that this is the life. One of the Irish lads chimed in for a second after a long silence.

"If you're young the best thing in the world you can do is drop everything and go travel. Why wouldn't you want to see the world?"

He said it with more conviction and character than I did. We all agreed, and departed.

Got two scuba dives in today. I'm exhausted. Had some serious stuff go down involving someone diving unsafe in my group and getting banished from the boat, the worst situation i've ever been in scuba diving, and having to board a rescue boat.

Yet diving remains one of my most favorite things in the world to do. And every disaster I learn an enormous amount from, and the second dive today was terrific. I'll write soon. Need sleep so bad. My insomnia cure: diving.



-

I know I said I'd miss some people in Melbourne, but I just want to say thanks to those people who were really helpful and friendly so graciously to a stranger like myself.

Especially Jemma.

with that i'm going to collapse into a deep slumber feeling like i'm still underwater... one more day in perth, then japan.


my last look at melbourne before i left

From David Mitchell's book Black Swan Green that I was reading on the plane, as told by its 13 year old hero who I have a lot of fondness for.

Eavesdropping's sort of thrilling 'cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.

and

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

and from Cloud Atlas...

Hae Joo completed the code. "Travel far enough, you meet yourself."