Monthly Archives: September 2008

Meditating Wind no. 37

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Meditating Wind no. 37

I haven’t posted pictures lately in the Meditating Wind series. So I dug out a pair from the archives of my mac and put them in my flickr account. These were taken in Ueno Park just outside the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ueno is full of museums and so it’s one of my favorite neighborhoods. But you don’t even need to enter a museum to be among art. There’s public art everywhere. Even the police substation in the center of the park is an interesting architectural curiosity, with Darth Vaderish Bauhaus elements. And don’t miss the excellent Rodin collection that’s just outside the entrance of the National Museum of Western Art.

These two pictures seem to represent different kinds of meditative experiences. They both play with perspective and illusion. But in the one above, the self is prominent and separate from experience. In the one below, the self is an insignificant speck completely absorbed in experience, not self-conscious at all, but still present.

During meditation, I tend to go back and forth between these two states, eventually settling into one. I can’t say one is better than the other. In the detached, self-conscious state, I get more insight. In the absorbed, self-less state, I feel closer to pure experience and enlightenment. Or maybe I just feel more sleepy. I like how the silver ball melts into the sky, and the emptiness of the hole seems to be the most solid element in the composition.

Meditating Wind no. 38

Sipping Coffee on LeCorbusier

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Cassina IXC

There’s a furniture store on the first floor of the building where I work out. They have designer furniture from the greats like LeCorbusier and Mackintosh. It’s like a museum actually. The cool thing about this store is that it has a café inside. So you can sit on $11,000 chairs and eat Vietnamese noodles and sip very strong iced coffee, served by silent black-clad waiters. I never entered before because it looks expensive and well, pretentious. But actually 1,000 yen will get you a very tidy meal, al dente. For directions click here.

There’s the usual pampered young Shibuya housewives with their ignored kids dressed in designer garb. And there are always groups of what looks to me like designers of some sort. They are dressed in dark clothes, wear ironically chunky glasses, and their haircuts are sculpted into well-placed disarray. And they always have at least one open laptop and some very important papers scattered about their tables.

Still, it’s a totally chill atmosphere. It’s never crowded, never noisy. There’s not even any piped-in music. The only sounds are the sounds of self-important chatter and the street noise outside. But it’s all absorbed nicely by the furniture.

I sat on the long counter, soaking in the first pleasant day of autumn. Scribbling in my notebook and then spacing out at the minimalist flower arrangement in front of me.

Recommended Company: your friends in ‘design’ and architecture to smirk at the latest fads.

Suggested Reading: biographies of mid-century modernists.

Likely Activities: sketching perfect curves and concocting self-referential parodies.

Photo from the Cassina website, until I can take a decent picture of the place. Click on the picture for the source.

Zits, the Time Traveler (and Powell’s)

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The Longest Preface Ever to a Book Review

When we went through Portland, we spent some time at the biggest new and used bookstore in the world. I’m not even sure if that’s a true statement, but when you wander around Powell’s City of Books, it sure feels like it’s the biggest.

Whenever I visit, I’m always amazed that it’s still around, still not bought out, or squeezed out, by a corporate book peddler. Instead, it’s mushroomed into a big chunk of downtown Portland. And it’s sent off spores, with annexes all over town devoted to such things as cookbooks and technical manuals. It also has a great alternative to Amazon, a more soulful online service that respects the reader and the book. I encourage you to try it: powells.com

Over the years, I’ve seen nearly all my favorite independent bookstores go out of business, thanks to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders. I’m not angry or sad about it. Change happens. Industries always mutate and transform, just like everything else.

I miss leisurely perusing used bookstores. But I also like that I don’t have to wander through a dozen bookstores to find something obscure. Or wait a few weeks while a special order finally arrives in whatever condition the postal gods allow. Now I can just do a search on Amazon or Powell’s and there it is.

This is especially nice if you live in Japan. New books in English are about double the price in the US, and they’re mostly of the Michael Crichton/Danielle Steele variety. There are three English language used bookstores in Tokyo that I know of. As a matter of fact, one is right in my neighborhood. It’s not bad. But I never find anything that I specifically want. I’ll go in there when I have a free hour and maybe buy something that I would never buy in the US. But my hunger for literature is so great that I’ll eat whatever scraps the expats before me have left behind.

So that’s why when I was in Powell’s I bought a bagful of books. A nice thick stack that I’ve been gnawing through since I’ve returned. I just finished the first one and here’s my review.

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Finally, the Actual Review

Flight by Sherman Alexie

I love reading Sherman Alexie. His protagonists are angry and funny, and barely sympathetic. He’s not afraid to experiment with narrative, and the experimentation never gets in the way of the story. He also writes hilarious essays on basketball.

Sherman Alexie hadn’t written a novel in ten years. He’s mostly a short story writer. The short stories often fit together into an overarching narrative. And his novels read like a series of short stories. Flight is a hallucinogenic action-packed series of visual episodes, patched together into a novel.

Sure there’s a single main character throughout the novel. But the 15 year old orphan does a bit of time-traveling as well as finding himself inhabiting different people. The time-traveling teenager, named Zits, is a mess of angst, undirected frustration, shame, bitterness, hurt, and lots of acne. He’s been in over 20 foster homes, was abandoned by his dad at birth, and abandoned by his mom when she died of cancer.

The rage and alienation that Zits feels leads to the moment before or after a horrific act that ends in his death. Most of the reviews that I read about the novel paint it as the boy acquiring redemption through inhabiting different perspectives via time travel, and thus preventing the act. But the cozy sit-com happy ending just doesn’t fit into the awfulness of his crappy life. It seemed like a glib way of ending the story. Did Alexie lack the courage to continue the cynical hopeless voice of the teenager, and bring his life to its logical conclusion?

I refuse to believe this. I suspect that in the last moments of his death, Zits hallucinates a fantasy ending, a delusional alternate life. The main reason I believe this is because he befriends the most unlikeliest of characters, a Nietzsche quoting pale white boy he meets in jail who rescues him from a halfway home. Inexplicably, Zits, who doesn’t let anyone get close to him, opens up to this boy, is armed by him, and then told to shoot up a bank.

Clearly, the white boy is a projection of his mind, one of the many voices in Zits head. He schizophrenically inhabits the minds of various people throughout history, including his imagined father. They compete for his attention in the last jumbled moments of his life. And they all represent aspects of his shattered self.

But then again, it could just be the happy ending that Alexie intended. And it doesn’t matter if it was real or not, as long as that’s the way Zits experienced it, trying to bring peace to a short unpeaceful life.

At the Temple of Paul Bunyan

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Paul Bunyan

When we were driving through redwood country in northern California, we came across a colossal statue of Paul Bunyan and his companion, Babe the blue ox. Paul Bunyan is an American legend, a mythical, giant lumberjack. There are all kinds of stories about his adventures. This statue, which was in the parking lot of the Trees of Mystery attraction, had the voice of a man speaking to the tourists who approached the statue to take pictures. Paul Bunyan and I chatted about our trip. It was a neat trick.

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The Paul Bunyan stories mostly consist of him being very very very large and doing things with a huge impact. You could say that Paul Bunyan is kind of a deity. He’s larger than life, has unworldly powers. And there are statues of him all over the US where he is revered and honored.

The whole thing reminds me of Hindu shrines, especially the temples dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva and his bovine companion, Nandi. Notice how both of their right hands are raised in the position of a classic mudra.  They also both hold weapons.  Paul holds his trusty ax, while Shiva has his trident.  Paul is almost always portrayed in blue trousers.  And Shiva is usually depicted with blue skin.  Babe is also always blue.  While Nandi is white, there is a species of antelope in Northern India called a nilgai or blue bull.  There are so many of them that they’re considered pests.

Shiva and Paul Bunyan also share many similar adventures.  They’ve both subdued giant snakes, formed mountain ranges, created rivers or oceans, and generally go about their business with moral indifference.

Could there be some connection here between the Paul Bunyan legends and Indian cosmology?

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Always Coming Home: The Windiad no. 12

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This is the last installment of the Windiad, my epic journey back to the West Coast of the US, with thick references to Homer’s The Odyssey, another story about a man going home. To read the whole thing, all out of order but conveniently numbered for the linearly-minded, click on this sentence.

At the End of the World
It’s been a few weeks since we returned from the US. It took two weeks just to finish unpacking because I was so busy with work. And three weeks to write the rest of the Windiad. America already seems like a dream. Except when I follow the election and then it’s a bit of a nightmare.

I’m back among the busy, hard-working, sleep-deprived Japanese. The cicadas have already gone underground. Typhoon season has begun, with a huge monster of a storm coming this way.

The first week back, there were nonstop thunderstorms. Twice, the boom of thunder woke me up and I thought Tokyo was being attacked or there was a terrorist bomb that exploded nearby. It was apocalyptic. There’s no other way to describe it. If the world ends, that’s how it would go. It’s since calmed down and now the weather is balmy, cool. I feel like I can think again, without the weight of humidity pressed against my brain.

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Where is Ithaca?
I’ve been able to contemplate once again, what home is to me. Is it America? Most certainly. I felt comfortable and at ease. My family is there, most of my friends. Large swathes of my past.

And what part of America is my home? I haven’t been to my hometown in Southern California since 1999, and I haven’t lived there since 1988. I felt a disconnect in Eugene, where I lived for a decade. Aside from many good friends who still live there, the town was full of faces I vaguely recognized. Santa Cruz, where I attended university isn’t recognizable at all since it’s been rebuilt after the ’89 earthquake. And I’ve never lived in Portland, where I most felt at home.

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Now when people ask me where I’m from, I just say, The West Coast. It encompasses the Pacific Ocean, the Coast Mountain Range, the Cascades, the conifer forests, the oak hills, and Interstate Highway 5. It covers all the small college towns that I’ve lived in all up and down the coast. Most of my family and many of my friends are there. So the West Coast, that’ll do.

And what about Tokyo, my home for the last 3 years. Is this the Ithaca (Odysseus’ home) that I’ve been sailing to? Or is this just another of the many islands that I’ll be stopping at on the way back ‘home’? It certainly is home. I have a blast with T’s sizable big-hearted, fun-loving family. They really make it feel like home.

Odysseus criss-crossed across the Aegean Sea trying to get back to his kingdom and his wife, Penelope. But in my odyssey, my wife traveled with me. So in a way, I was already ‘home’, yet on my way home.



On My Way, Never Arriving
One of my favorite books, that’s almost impossible to find now, is Ursula K LeGuin’s ‘anthropology of the future’, Always Coming Home. This work of fiction imagined a future, post-industrial California. The title refers to a song sung by members, of this imagined culture, who are best described as the tribe’s adventurers and explorers. I was finally able to write down this song from the copy that I’ve kept at my parents’ home.

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The idea is that these explorers are always on their way back home, even if they are on their way to other lands. At the same time, wherever they are, they are at home. They are always coming home. I relate to this sense of never having arrived, never feeling like I’m home yet. But I have also always felt that wherever I was living at the moment, I could stay there for a long time. I felt both at home and not at home.


That’s how I feel about Tokyo too. Our plan, my Penelope and I, is to stay a couple more years. But it doesn’t really matter where we go. Our home is wherever we are together. Maybe when people ask where I’m from, I should just say, “I don’t know quite where my home is, but I do know that I’m here.”

Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge by Ursula K LeGuin

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be your mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.