a creature feminine

cafe de f.o.b.

2006-07-19T00:30:00.000+09:00

cafe de f.o.b., tokyo

at least it's fresh.

Conservative Washington Thinktank Hires 'Feminist' Illegal Alien

2006-05-20T01:39:00.000+09:00

Too weird to be true? Well, the press reports that now ex-Dutch hardliner MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali is being forced to leave the Netherlands for having falsified her Dutch citizenship documents. And a rightwing DC thinktank wants her to help them come up with a plan to "deal" with America's illegal immigrants. Check out the story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4986418.stm

tunafish sandwiches and atomic bombs

2006-05-14T12:23:00.000+09:00

Here is one possible interpretation of Yoko Ono's "Tunafish Sandwich Piece" from her book _Grapefruit_, which was originally published in a limited edition (500 copies) by Wunternaum Press in 1964:

Tunafish Sandwich Piece

Imagine one thousand suns in the
sky at the same time.
Let them shine for one hour.
Then, let them gradually melt
into the sky.
Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.

The first time I read this, I thought, "What the (*$^?" But now that I think about it, the atomic blast at Nagasaki has been referred to as "The Day of a Thousand Suns". Could this be an instruction poem about the absurdity of war? That the only reaction to such a thing is to try to imagine the dissolution of such explosives, and to focus on mundane, everyday realities such as eating a sandwich? Incidentally, this poem appears in Japanese in the original copy of _Grapefruit_.

the square root of metaphor

2006-05-11T23:50:00.000+09:00

Recently, I've been fascinated by mathematical poetry (particularly those written by post-Fluxus Asian poets). Check out this cool English-Japanese-French trilingual journal called n factorial. I especially recommend Three Factorial.

An occupied imagination is better than a vacant one

2006-03-13T08:55:00.000+09:00

Last night I watched Elia Suleiman's "Divine Intervention" (2002). It was rebelatory. I just made up that word to describe something that arrives suddenly like a revelation (revelatory), but that also simultaneously awakens you to your own inner rebellions. There's a great review of the movie here:

http://www.johnmenick.com/archives/000006.php

If Itami Juzo had been Palestinian and a doper, he might have made a movie like this.

impressionistic paragraph from a sunny afternoon

2006-03-06T02:11:00.000+09:00

Simple things arrest you. Your sister at the kitchen counter peeling
an orange. Light streaming in through the window to the right,
throwing her stark-ashed silhouette onto the porcelain white
refrigerator, shadow cut off at the wrists so you can't see what the
hands are doing – deliberate and mysterious as if practicing a
newly-written piano sonata for the first time, very slowly as in a
dream, no way of knowing if the amputated elbow is fingering the right
or left hand part, impossible to distinguish from which side
you are viewing the profile of this silent apparition of music.

Ueno Chizuko on women in the military

2006-01-23T18:14:00.000+09:00

As a feminist, what should my position be on women in military combat positions? In principle of course, I believe women should equal OPPORTUNITIES as men. There is a somewhat subterranean assumption that, if women had a bigger role in the military, the patriarchal culture of masculine militarism would itself change. In practice however, the record indicates otherwise - the few women who infiltrate the military in positions of responsibility are acculturated to be even more brutal than their male counterparts in order to be accepted/respected in those jobs. Case in point: Lynndie England, notorious Abu Ghraib torturer. At the Women's Worlds 2005 conference in Seoul, Ueno Chizuko put it succinctly: "The militarization of women happens much quicker than the feminization of the military." Clearly, having more female bodies in combat positions in the military is not (in and of itself) sufficient to change the culture of military masculinity - we are naive to think that such a complex problem can be ameliorated by shifting numbers around. I am not advocating that women be kept out of military positions - quite the contrary. All I am saying is that we need to refine our expectations of what it means when women serve in the military.

poshlostranenie

2006-01-23T18:02:00.000+09:00

Latest discovery: the album "28" by Aoki Takamasa and Tsujiko Noriko. I just turned 28 less than a month ago, so this is fortuitous. I can easily say that this is the best Japanese electronica that my earwax has danced to in recent memory - DNTEL+the voice of a Bjorkian Bebel Gilberto. The haunting repetitiveness of aural math. Deeply-structured ephemera filtered through rewound, reverb nostalgia. これはスゴイ。

The "N" word

2005-11-26T03:49:00.000+09:00

"New killer [sic: nuclear] weapons still have a vital role to play in our security and that of our allies." - President George W. Bush

rhapsody in praise of mental defecation

2005-11-26T02:57:00.000+09:00

Upon my being accepted to graduate school for a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, my father (an astrophysicist) described the work of a literary critic to me thus: "Literature is mental excrement. Therefore the work of the literary critic is to eat shit and to shit out twice-digested, second-grade shit." Uh....thanks, Dad. On another occasion, he once described to me one of his projects, the Massive Air-Shower Satellite (MASS). Originally, he had simply christened it the Air Shower Satellite project, but when he realized that there was an acronym problem, he decided to add the word "massive" to the name. Henceforth he refers to this work as "the MASS that came from my ASS." For more on my father's excreta, see http://www.uah.edu/physics/personnel/faculty/takahashi.html
So it seems that the work of the physicist is not all that distant from the work of the literary critic. We are all, better or worse, practitioners of mental defecation. What I am wondering to myself now is: what is the most effective intellectual laxative?
The thing that spurred all these thoughts / memories was an article on Anna Ogino's parodic re-writings of Rabelais reprinted appropriately in a book entitled "The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father". As you may know, Rabelais' Gargantua is a scientific prodigy who, at the tender age of five, conducts numerous experiments in order to ascertain what material is best suited for wiping one's ass (the answer? a well-downed goose). Anna Ogino (whose father was Franco-American) is a prominent writer and French lit. professor at Keio University, where I studied this summer. I would often see her, this stylish, slim, short-haired professor who was always immaculately put-together, rushing from the library to the faculty tower and back. Hard to believe that she is so full of shit (and I mean that as an Eloge paradoxaux). The author of the article on Ogino writes, "What is unique about Rabelais, an what impresses Ogino, is his thorough, systematic treatment of the theme to the extent of creating a “a ludicrous, and yet well-structured microcosm” of a universe rotating around its “gay core” (i.e., “excrement”).” Hence we return to excremental cosmology (my father's profession) and pass just under the gaydar of latent homoeroticism in literary texts (one of my specialties).
Here's another question: what is the difference between plain old shit and bull shit? Note to self: you use way too many colons in your writing.
In my hometown, there was a kid whose name was pronounced "Sha-theed" but was spelled "Shithead". You must be asking yourself, what were his parents thinking? But maybe there is some strange twisted wisdom to this naming - kinda like my ex-coworker who went to the bathroom saying she had to "drop off her kids." In other words, I am also my father's shit.

over the crescent

2005-10-15T08:16:00.000+09:00

It's tsukimi (moon viewing) season, and tonight luna looks like a chipped pearl floating in a cold pond as it hesitates to become full over this city. I've been working non-stop this week, and now I'm having trouble calming down enough to sleep. I can not stop thinking about Lotus Moon. I'm also haunted by the series of lunar sea (mare) poems I still haven't finished. If the moon would speak, would anyone listen?

Wunderbar thought

2005-10-10T13:54:00.000+09:00

By bilingual Japanese-German author Tawada Yoko:

"A dream is a translation for which no original exists."

Basel

2005-10-10T13:33:00.000+09:00

So it's been almost a month since my last post - my life has been a bit crazy, traversing three continents in that time period. I returned to Philly from my stint in Tokyo on the 22 September, gave a talk on Kawahara Izumi at the Word and Image (IAWIS) conference at Penn on the 27th only to hear Art Spiegelman bash all Japanese manga wholesale as "this manga thing" that very evening. If only he knew the variety and quality of some of the manga in Japan - he is misled by the American otaku market that seems only to translate sci-fi mecha porn. Nihon no manga gyoukai mo, mouchotto manga o toushite nihon ga kokusai teki ni dou mirareteruka kangai naosu beki dato omou. The only person who seems to get it is Murakami Takashi, who unfortunately exploits the market dynamics for his own cynical gain, not for any deeply socially-conscious aesthetic.

Frantic unpacking, frantic meeting with advisors and grad chair re: going on the job market this year, a brief stay in Philly punctuated happily by fun outings with good friends (thanks to Lok, I got to see "Three Times," an amazing new film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien at the NY Film Festival, plus I got to hang out with the one and only Tung Hui-Hu who was in town from Berkeley for the aforementioned conference), frantic re-packing and flying off to Basel via Detroit and Amsterdam (thanks to Northwest Airlines, a company immensely talented in finding the most byzantine route to get to your final destination). So now I am in this charmingly surreal Swiss town about an hour outside Zurich, living on the top floor of a 15th century monastery store house which also once served as the home of Herman Hesse (who eventually moved out when he discovered he couldn't write here - hope that doesn't happen to me, since I have two articles to churn out very quickly, plus continuing work on the Rengetsu chapter of my dissertation). Some unnamed art guerilla tagger went around and painted Warhol-Velvet Underground banana labels on the facades of cool galleries in town, so all one has to do is make like a conceptual pop chimpanzee and follow the trail of one's superstructural appetites. It was an unseasonably balmy day for October, so I took a little stroll down to the Rhine river and watched the Sunday afternoon promenaders.

uncanny juxtaposition no.1

2005-09-15T06:12:00.000+09:00

"The biggest truth to face now—what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life—is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren....

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey."

- Kurt Vonnegut, _A Man Without a Country_

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

Now read this. It's from a memoir of an addict's experiences.

"There is glue and there is gasoline and I want them both. I grab the glue and I put the end of the tube below my nose and I lay a thick line on the skin between my nostrils and my lip. Each breath brings the stench of Hell and death, each breath brings on the desire for more. I am killing quickly and efficiently now, but not quickly or efficiently enough.

I lean over and place my nose just above the shimmering surface of the gasoline and I stare into the face of chemical annihiliation. This face is my friend, my enemy and my only option. I take it."

- James Frey, _A Million Little Pieces_

The "So be it" Union

2005-09-07T21:12:00.000+09:00

GROVER NORQUIST: "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

RICK SANTORUM: "In a weekend interview with WTAE-TV about the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Santorum said: "You have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.""

BARBARA BUSH: "What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overhwlemed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle)--this is working very well for them."

JACK BURKMAN: On MSNBC's "Connected - Jack: "I understand there are 10,000 people dead. It's terrible. It's tragic. But in a democracy of 300 million people, over years and years and years, these things happen."

CONDOLEEZA RICE: "Asked to say a few words from the pulpit, Rice, a preacher's daughter, said: "The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time." She added: "If we just wait."

DONALD RUMSFELD (April 2003 in reference to widespread chaos and looting in Iraq): "Stuff happens."

typhoon nabi hits japan

2005-09-07T00:50:00.000+09:00

4 people killed, 13 missing, over 50 injured in Kyushu. The streets of Kagoshima are flooded.

blogger on PacificViews comments:

"A typhoon has hit Japan, leaving 13 people missing or dead, causing landslides and forcing the evacuation of around 100,000 others. In other news, Congressman Dennis Hastert has suggested that the Japanese government consider not rebuilding a country that gets so regularly pummeled by nature ;)"

this is what compassion looks like

2005-09-07T00:01:00.000+09:00

THE HOMELESS men of St. John's Hospice don't have much. But they are gathering their pennies - literally - to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"They've already filled up two jars with coins, dollar bills, whatever they have," said Matthew Gambino, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Catholic Social Services runs the Race Street shelter, which houses about 40 men and feeds hundreds more each day.

The shelter's food service manager, Anthony Willoughby, helped come up with the idea, Gambino said, after the men said they desperately wanted to help in any way they could.

"They know what it's like, going without," said Donna Farrell, director of the archdiocese's Office for Communications.

http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/002342.html

I am utterly humbled. I wish I were back home in Philly right now so I can thank them.

what it means to be poor

2005-09-06T15:13:00.000+09:00

This story was posted today on the CNN reporter blog website:

---------
Rescue 'ticket'

Posted: 6:24 p.m. ET
CNN's Drew Griffin in New Orleans, Louisiana

I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a "ticket." Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn't believe these people were afraid they'd be charged for a rescue.

______________

race not a factor?

2005-09-06T07:41:00.000+09:00

Y'all have GOT to read this story from the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_ne...ews/ 4214746.stm

It includes testimony from British tourists (almost all white Anglo-Saxons, as you can see) who were stuck in the Superdome until Wednesday, when the U.S. military "snuck" them out.

Now, I don't want to downplay the plight of these poor Britons who got stuck in NO. They are victims too.

However, I can't see how anyone, after reading this article, can say that race _didn't_ make a difference in who got rescued out first, and who got stuck behind for days longer. Why weren't everyone rescued at the same time as these British tourists?

Yet no one has commented on this in the mainstream media - No one seems to see this. Or perhaps they don't want to see it.

Interestingly David Duke, the ex-con Grand Wizard of the KKK and former Louisiana Congressman(!), saw it. Though of course he saw it in a completely opposite light:

http://www.davidduke.com/index.php?p=379

Here's the thing folks. Racists will never admit to the fact that they are engaging in racism. Never. No one wants to admit anything so ugly about themselves - it's a very difficult thing to do. Even David Duke refers to his movement as "white supremacy", but never "racism." And yet all of us (yours truly included) participate (to varying degrees and in various ways) in a system of racism. Our purported racial or ethnic identity does not exempt us from this. And yet all of us have the power to resist it, starting from within ourselves. But we can not resist something that we can not, will not, see. Plain and simple. And even when we do see it, it doesn't mean that we will always have the courage to resist it. But seeing is the first step, the sine qua non. Please. Let's open our eyes.

this is war

2005-09-06T04:43:00.000+09:00

I missed this when it first came out - I found it thanks to mithras.blog.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5090&en=4579413ecb14ce16&ex=1274241600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

And please read this latest Army Times article, "Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans":

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1077495.php

Let it sink in. Just like the City that Care Forgot.

frendent

2005-09-06T04:06:00.000+09:00

The long-obvallated metropolis has been spiflicated by an aggestion of failures to heed the rogitations that prognosticated this event. As fuliginous countenances contruded in castrensian clusters amidst a surreal landscape that seemed almost areological, subrisions could scarcely be seen amidst what can only be described as a brakish hell for the nasute. Meanwhile the queer cuffin sometimes known as ‘The Dauphin” claimed that the calamity was inopinate, roggling constituents who interpellated this as evidence of the hyposthenia of increasingly fatiscent state apparati. Such sentiments will not easily be lenified, as the calyptra covering the dégringolade of this regime has been lifted to reveal a close vinculum to vested interests whose epithymy for ditation is apparently supernumerary.

spam problems - please register in order to post comments

2005-09-05T01:47:00.000+09:00

Ok, I've been getting too much spam comments to my recent posts, so I'm forced to tighten my settings so that only registered users can comment on my post. I hope the legit posters will sign up and keep posting! Thanks for keeping real conversation alive.

and the rich get richer off the corpses of the poor

2005-09-05T00:41:00.000+09:00

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/business/3335685

"Sept. 1, 2005, 8:30PM

The Houston Chronicle

HALLIBURTON HIRED FOR STORM CLEANUP

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so.

KBR was assigned the work under a "construction capabilities" contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to repair New Orleans' levees."

I see. So it took the federal government 5 days to get any semblance of order and help to the Katrina survivors, but they were much quicker in awarding a multi-million dollar clean-up contract to Halliburton. Meanwhile people were dying by the hour. Matter of fact people are STILL dying by the hour in Southern Mississippi and outlying Louisiana parishes such as St. Bernard and St. Tammeny.

National Geographic article from last year

2005-09-05T00:07:00.000+09:00

Read this National Geographic article from Oct. 2004 on Louisiana's wetlands. It's eerily prescient.

http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/index.html

"Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great."

-----------

What the article also points out is how decades of drilling for oil in the Gulf Coast has actually caused the land there to sink further into the sea.

"The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't come without a cost, largely exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on subsidence rates. For decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the surface. But two years ago former petroleum geologist Bob
Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After much study, Morton concluded that the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water lying with the petroleum deposits caused a drop in subsurface pressure—a theory known as regional depressurization. That led nearby underground faults to slip and the land above them to slump.

"When you stick a straw in a soda and suck on it, everything goes down," Morton explains. "That's very simplified, but you get the idea." The phenomenon isn't new: It was first documented in Texas in 1926 and has been reported in other oil-producing areas such as the North Sea and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won't speculate on what percentage of wetland loss can be pinned on the oil industry. "What I can tell you is that much of the loss between Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Terrebonne was caused by induced subsidence from oil and gas withdrawal. The wetlands are still there, they're just underwater." The area Morton refers to, part of the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest rates of wetland loss in the state."

Red Cross banned from entering New Orleans

2005-09-04T00:14:00.000+09:00

This just in:

http://www.redcross.org/faq/0,1096,0_682_4524,00.html#4524

The Red Cross has been banned by the gov't from entering New Orleans. What the Feng-shui is going on? They'll let Bush in to pose for the camera, but they won't let the Red Cross in? How, pray tell, does that work?

confederacy of dunces

2005-09-03T22:37:00.000+09:00

Ok, I have to say something - it's hard to be here, halfway across the world, to see the horror, the denigration of humanity, and utter ineptitude unfolding in the bayou-lands where I grew up and to feel so powerless to help other than by donating money to the Red Cross and other charities.

I've been trying to contact my friends down there, but haven't been able to get through to everyone. Lt. Teakie Smith, are you and your family ok? Robbie, are your relatives safe?

(Background note: From ages 2 to 7, I lived in Baton Rouge, LA where my father was a research prof at Louisiana State University. His income was too low to support our family of 5 so we lived in public housing and depended on food stamps. At least back then, casualized immigrant academic workers still had some semblance of health insurance - otherwise, I would have died from the severe bout of Kawasaki's disease that afflicted me when I was four).

The floodgates have opened. Literally. Yesterday "The Dauphin" said, "I will not forget what I have seen here [in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama]." Well, neither will the rest of America. You can bet on that.

At the newstand here in Tokyo, I overheard a conversation re: the pictures of New Orleans on the front page of the newspaper:
"This is America? It can't be. It looks like some place in Africa - the Sudan or something."

What has happened in the Gulf Coast, aside from the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina itself, amounts to a GENOCIDE OF NEGLECT. This is not just "unacceptable," Mr. Dauphin, it is INEXCUSABLE. So we better not hear any more excuses coming from your administration, or from your Brown-nosed lackey at FEMA. Your failures amount to CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE, plain and simple.

Let's talk about money. Class. Race. (And kudos to Jack Schafer from Slate who was one of the first and few journalists to discuss this: http://slate.msn.com/id/2124688/nav/tap2/device/html40/workarea/3/). The brutal truth about these matters is finally starting to confront the masses of the usually-complacent American public. There are spin doctors and journalists and pundits out there (oh, and don't forget Condeleeza Rice!) trying to say that race had nothing to do with this tragedy. Bullshit. We are talking about David Duke country. We are talking about a place where, when my family was driving from New Orleans back to Baton Rouge after Mardi Gras, we were shouted down and harrassed by a truckload of rednecks in the next lane who yelled "Go back to Vietnam!"

We are talking about media captions that describe white people taking things from supermarkets as "finding", but when a black child does it, it's called "looting." We are talking about a National Guard being sent down with "shoot-to-kill' orders as reported by the BBC, CNN, and others (and rightly pointed out by Kanye West, who was later censored by NBC. CENSORED).

We are talking about rich people being evacuated and given food, water, antibiotics and an airlift from the Hyatt immediately after the storm, while just next door at the Superdome (a.k.a. "Sewerdome:") scores of predominantly poor black people (many sick, infirm, or too young or old to help themselves) were passed by, and remained stuck in inhumane conditions for nearly 100 hours after the storm hit.

The best comment I read on a blog today was: "Maybe if all those people had been white women in a vegetative state, food would have gotten to them sooner."

Ok, now let's focus on the class issue. The Gulf Coast of the Southeastern US is some of the poorest parts of the country. A full 1/3 of New Orleans residences were living under the poverty line. It is a city where a sizable portion of its population work low-wage service jobs that serve the relatively-well-off tourists who come to "get wild" on spring break and what not. The Bush administration has SYSTEMATICALLY taken money away from the poor while enriching the top 1% income bracket of the country (if you don't believe me, just look at the recent tax cuts, the recent rulings by the anti-worker, Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board, the reduction in funding for social services that lower-income households depend upon, and the fact that Senator Bill Frist is prioritzing the repeal of estate taxes even as the poorest of the poor Hurricane Katrina victims continue to suffer, etc.).

On Wednesday, graduate student-employees at NYU (who make less than $20,000 a year in a city where a studio apartment costs at least $1500/mo.) held a rally to protest the University administration's reliance on the horrendous National Labor Relations Board Brown Decision (July 2004) as justification for busting the grad student workers' union there. Their contract expired on that day. The corporatized University administration still refuses to negotiate a new contract with the union. 76 people were arrested in that demonstration.

On Friday, Boeing shut down its operations due to a machinists' strike.

This week, CNN interviewed a poor white mechanic in Mississippi who had lost everything in the storm, was hungry and thirsty, who directly said to the camera "President Bush don't need to be the presiden' no more."

At least the poor majority living in the Red States is finally starting to wake up to the fact that the Dauphin has abandoned the very people who helped to get him elected. That he has, in essence, let this whole, historically depressed region of the country get flushed down the toilet.

The class struggle is just beginning.

funeral music makes me happy

2005-08-26T20:01:00.000+09:00

My latest musical obsession is with the Montreal-based band, Arcade Fire. Their album, "Funeral," is pure genius and "real fun" - it's like neo-80s petit-punk synth rock with a twist. Like the Brit band The Clientele who not only nostalgically mimic vintage 60s music but actually manage to take the genre several steps further, Arcade Fire takes me back to the aura of my childhood in the '80s while extending my adult mind at the same time. The song "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" opens with these ineffable キラキラピコピコ（もうこれが何とも言えなくたまらない！) sliced through with savory syncopations that are simultaneously sharp and expansive. The lead singer's voice sounds like David Bowie's merged with the guy from Coldplay, and then rendered more vulnerable, even more soulful. So you can almost forgive him the fact that he "parle français comme une vache texane."

word watch of the day

2005-08-26T04:32:00.000+09:00

"boybeater"

= n. a fitted wife-beater tank top for ladies.

globalization and art

2005-08-17T22:00:00.000+09:00

Still reeling from the thoughts set off by this quote I read today:

"It is not totally wrong to say that an excessive awareness, or too much discussion, of 'abroad' [海外] and 'international art establishment' [国際画壇] is the reverse side of ultranationalism [国粋主義]. We are in a transitional phase. When we no longer argue loudly about these issues, true internationality [国際性] shall begin."

-Nakahara Yuusuke, "Kaisetsu ni kaete: Korâjufûna sengo bijutsu no ayumi 1956-67" ("In Lieu of Commentary: The Development of Postwar ARt 1956-67, in Collagelike Compilation")

What exactly is "true internationality"? And who is the "we" here? Japanese? Japanese artists? The international art community? If he means us Japanese, then i wonder whether the end of discussion or argument about these issues might not herald the beginning of true internationality so much as the entrance of Japan into the top of an international aesthetic hierarchy. And that would be problematic so long as the structure of international power and value-making remains unchanged. I think we need to argue on this some more.

tsunami warning

2005-08-16T12:14:00.000+09:00

ok, just checked the news again and it seems the epicenter of the quake was just off the coast at miyagi. magnitude 6.8. the tohoku and tokaido high-speed train lines have been affected and need to be recalibrated at Odawara station. now there is a tsunami warning out for the citizens of miyagi - i hope they're ok...that's the toughest thing about natural disasters here. they tend to be double whammies. it is now raining in tokyo.

another one

2005-08-16T12:01:00.000+09:00

just got woken up by another quake (just don't ask me what i'm doing sleeping in until 11:46am on a tuesday).
miyagi prefecture got hit the hardest, with a magnitude 6. what i felt here was something in the magnitude 4 range.
(see map) at: http://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/
still, i worry about this old house. sure creaks and moans a lot. could it withstand anything much stronger than a magnitude 5? the temple around the corner had major structural damage from the quake last month.
there are a lot more earthquakes this summer than i remember in previous summers...

cigarette ettiquette ad campaign

2005-08-11T17:24:00.000+09:00

I saw this ad on the Chuo Line the other day. Courtesy of Japan Railways (JR). The text reads: "Probably the kind of litter I see most often in Japan is cigarette butts. Before passing gas I look behind me. But I don't bother when I'm smoking."

The best tonkatsu in the universe

2005-08-11T16:33:00.000+09:00

Last night I ate the most delicious tonkatsu I've ever eaten. Definitely check it out - "Tonta" is about a 10 min. walk from Takadanobaba station in Tokyo (take the Waseda exit). You go there, and it's a tiny 1-room restaurant with only 2 or 3 tables and a countertop. They give you a mortar and pestle filled with different kinds of sesame which you grind yourself. Then, you mix your sauce from a buffet of ingredients: I recommend their special dark-taste sauce mixed with ketchup and ground sesame. The teishoku comes with rice, miso soup, pickles, hijiki appetizer, fruit for dessert.

latest raves

2005-08-11T16:27:00.000+09:00

Listening to:

Pappelallee album by Naomi

Reading:

Drop Dead Cute exhibition catalogue

and another thing

2005-08-11T16:22:00.000+09:00

Even if the NLRB decision described in my last post refers to employers banning dating amongst their employees...what would that mean?

Here in Japan, it would change the dynamics of dating entirely. Almost every single one of my 11 cousins met their spouses in the workplace.

Of course, there are more diverse opportunities for romantic encounters in US society than in Japan...but still, I'm willing to bet that a lot of people get together through work connections.

I wonder what happens to employers (e.g. the boss) who fraternizes with his employees? Who regulates that?

sororitize then

2005-08-11T15:53:00.000+09:00

I can not BELIEVE this latest ruling by the U.S. National Relations Board. Whatever happened to Freedom of Assembly under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution? Oh, but the 1st Amendment refers only to Congress, not the NLRB...this is so incredibly underhanded. The NLRB isn't even democratically elected, damn it. The info blurb below is from the AFL-CIO website - why isn't the media reporting this? They were raising hay about the AFL-CIO split just last week. They only report things that portray unions in a negative light.
-----------

In a Big Brother Ruling, NLRB Says Workers Can Be Banned from Interacting
Outside the Workplace

Aug. 5—In a slap in the face to America’s workers, the
Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled employers
can ban off-duty interaction among co-workers—a clear attack on an
individual’s right to freedom of association, speech and privacy,
according to American Rights at Work, a nonprofit group advocating to
restore workers’ freedom to form unions.

The June 7 decision came in the case of Guardsmark, a national security firm
that imposed a rule directing employees not to “fraternize on duty or off
duty, date or become overly friendly with the client’s employees or with
co-employees.” In September 2003, workers filed unfair labor practice
charges against Guardsmark, saying the company’s rules inhibited its
employees’ rights under federal labor law to form, join or assist unions.
Federal labor law allows employers to ban association among co-workers
during work hours, but Guardsmark’s regulations banned off-duty
association of co-workers as well.

“The NLRB gives employers the green light to invade our privacy and chip
away at our most basic rights in the workplace,” says David Bonior,
chairman of American Rights at Work.

The Republican majority of the board argued workers likely would interpret
the rule as merely a ban on dating, not a prohibition of the association
among co-workers protected by the law. But the dissenting member,
Democratic-appointee Wilma Liebman, said because the rule already specifies
dating, workers logically would understand fraternization to mean something
else, such as their freedom to associate and form unions.

The Guardsmark decision is the latest in a series of NLRB rulings that
restrict workers’ freedom to form unions. Last November, in a partisan
3–2 vote, the board effectively eliminated the right of temporary agency
workers to form unions by ruling that temporary agency workers cannot be
included in a bargaining unit with permanent employees unless both the
temporary agency and the client’s employer consent and the permanent
employer consents.

That decision showed the “onerous climate in which the board is
increasingly siding with employers over workers and denying workers their
federally protected rights to form unions,” said AFL-CIO President John
Sweeney.

In July 2004, the board ruled graduate assistants are students, not
employees, and not entitled to the protections of federal labor law.

“No flawed labor board decision can erase the fact that the freedom to
form unions is a fundamental human right. When the government takes away
federally sanctioned avenues to form unions, America’s workers will
organize nonetheless,” Sweeney said.

The fallout from that decision already has begun. New York University (NYU)
officials announced Aug. 5 they would no longer recognize UAW Local 2110 as
the bargaining representative for about 1,000 graduate assistants when the
current contract expires Aug. 31. NYU was the first private university to
recognize a union for graduate assistants.

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

The right to form unions is an international human right. Here is info from the HREA (Human Rights Education Associates):
http://www.hrea.org/learn/guides/freedom-of-association.html

d) Right to belong to trade unions
Freedom of association has a critical meaning in the workplace and much of the jurisprudence which has developed on this issue comes from labour law. The following rights are upheld:

- Right of everyone to form and join trade unions for the promotion of their economic and social interests. Some states have attempted to curtail the activity of trade unions by hindering people from joining. In other places, certain categories of workers are excluded from enjoying these rights by national legislation. Examples include agricultural and domestic workers and others employed in informal settings; independent contractors; managers etc. In international law, the only exception to this right applies to the police and armed forces who do not have the right to form professional associations if this is contrary to national law. Other public employees have this right under international labour law although the extent to which civil servants are able to enjoy these rights has been a matter of debate in a number of countries.

- Right to form national and international confederations. It is essential for domestic groups to interact with each other at broader levels. In some countries the authorities have sought to hinder external contacts.

- Right of individual not to be penalised for belonging to a union i.e. if a person belongs to a union this should not be a reason for denying this person employment or for firing this person if he or she is already in employment.

- Right to strike. This is not an absolute right. It is by necessity nuanced as it affects other societal interests. This is especially so where public employees are providing essential services, the disruption of which may threaten the life, health and safety of the population. Fire fighters, for example, are prohibited from striking in some countries. Governments have attempted to hinder the right to strike through a variety of strategies Some countries, for example, adopt a permanent replacement doctrine whereby striking employees are replaced by new employees loyal to the employer who then vote the union out of existence. Such practices contravene international law.

- Right of organisations to elect representatives and draw up their own rules and constitutions. They are also protected from being dissolved by administrative authority. These provisions exist to protect associations from unreasonable interference in governance.
------------------------------------------------

It is clear that the NLRB and US Labor Law does not exist to protect the rights of workers.

howlin'

2005-08-10T13:52:00.000+09:00

I decided to test Angela Carter's theory on stories and wolves, so I downloaded an audiobook entitled "I thought my father was god and other stories" from the NPR National Story Project edited and read by Paul Auster. I'm still on chapter 1, which is on animals, and even now I can already say that NOT all stories are about wolves. They may have a wolfish figure in it, or wolves might somehow come into the picture, and yes in some they are the featured villain/love interest, but there are plenty of tales devoid of any lupine presence. Of course, one might argue that if you look closely enough, someone/something in any story function as a kind of "wolf," just as every violin has a wolf tone somewhere in the lower register (mine happens to be the F above middle C on the G string). But then again, if you're looking for something like that, you start to see it everywhere - such is the nature of obsession, as we know from reading V by Thomas Pynchon or watching Pi by Darren Aranofsky. What are you looking for? Where have you found it today? I wonder what my obsession is, besides Paul Auster?

what is it like to be a woman?

2005-08-09T23:17:00.000+09:00

"Everyone wants a piece of you;
No one wants the whole of you."

literary theory in 5 words or less

2005-08-03T03:29:00.000+09:00

“All stories are about wolves” –Angela Carter, via Margaret Atwood’s _The Blind Assassin_

What to make of this?

more taiwan pics (not on flickr)

2005-08-02T21:59:00.000+09:00

rocket city, alabama

2005-08-02T21:40:00.000+09:00

A little context for my last post. From ages 7 to 17, I lived in a town called Huntsville, Alabama, a.k.a. "Rocket City." It's the home of Space Camp and the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, as well as the U.S. Army's Redstone Arsenal. Every few weeks there would be missile tests that would shake the house - they tended to take place in the mornings just as we were waking up. My father once fell out of his bed because of the boom from a missile test. It was rumored that the USSR had the city on its top ten target list in the event of nuclear war.

Until the 1950s, Huntsville was just a po-dunk cotton farming town in northern Alabama. Then the US decided it needed more weapons and missiles to beat the Russians, so it enlisted the help of Dr. Werner von Braun and his team from Peenemunde (the guys responsible for developing the V-2 rockets for the Nazis during WWII) and imported them into this sleepy little place in the Tennessee Valley. Yes, he's the guy parodied in Dr. Strangelove, and amply written about in Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_. Von Braun did wonders for the US space exploration by developing the Saturn V rockets while living out the rest of his days in Huntsville. Now the town has mock-up models of jet propellers and tanks in lieu of public art sculptures; most of its public schools are named after astronauts who burned up in space; the First Baptist Church downtown has a metal steeple in the shape of a rocket; and now the major public gathering space is called "The Von Braun Civic Center." There is a cross-burning about once every 2 years. Today major weapons of mass destruction are designed and developed there - companies such as Boeing, Integraph, Lockheed Martin have offices in Rocket City.

waking life, quaking life

2005-08-01T12:16:00.000+09:00

Just woke up from a nap and a dream. I dreamt I was in a vast, rich, multi-ethnic underground city that looked like a large tokyo shopping complex (sim. to the "Italian villa" remake in Odaiba, or perhaps CineCitta in Kawasaki, or Roppongi Hills) combined with elements of Paris and Park Avenue. Definitely NOT like that place in Matrix 2. This one was full of light and sparkles. Anyway, I was there joining my sister and my cousin for some last minute shopping before Haruna left the country. She kept not finding what she wanted to buy, as it was some kind of holiday and many places were closed. I remeber at one point we went into what we thought was a boutique, but was in fact a small church chapel where everyone was white (Caucasian), and the choir sang bad Euro-pop remakes of classical lieder. We made our exit and just as I found a shop that looked like it would sell what my sister wanted the merchandise evaporated and sirens went off. I thought maybe I had accidentally pressed some button, and for a moment I was afraid I'd be misapprehended as a thief. I finally jumped some display shelves to reach my sister and cousin, who told me there was an earthquake that may hit at any moment, and that the siren announcements were directing people to exits to climb up to the ground level. It was chaos, and I eventually lost my sis and cousin in the crowd. The plan of the city was extremely confusing, and there was no one stairwell that could take you all the way up to the top. The announcements kept saying that it was 290 meters from the bottom level to ground level. I kept trying to avoid standing below huge pillars or bridges or buildings. I remember praying to god or buddha and whoever else I could remember. I was wearing stilletoes and a skirt - I think I ripped slits into the skirt for easier movement (a la Gwyneht Paltrow in that scene from Sky Captain) and took off the heels. At one point I went up the sides of an industrial duct. What was interesting was that, though these physical feats were painful and difficult in the dream, they were not impossible. It was all very Lara Croft. When I finally broke through to the surface, there were a bunch of hippies sitting on a grass knoll looking at the cloudy sky and watching the Earthquake clouds (地震雲). That's when I woke up.

Note: There are some who say that before an earthquake, strange clouds appear in the sky. This is not a confirmed geological/metereological connection, but there are people researching this.

Upon waking, it strikes me that I'm living in a place where it is impossible to buy into the illusion of stability. There are little earthquakes all the time (that's right, Tori) - just yesterday there was a mild one. I barely missed the magnitude 5 earthquake which hit Tokyo last week (If my plane out to Taipei had been another hour later, I might not have been able to leave, since the Skyliners were not operating as normal), which stopped many of the elevators in the city (some people had to stay in a stuck elevator for almost a whole day before they could be rescued). Even after the cold war, imagining the possibility of being hit by nuclear missiles is still very real here. Next month Hiroshima commemorates the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings. I think this dream contains elements of flashback for me (among many other things, of course) - a return to my childhood at the end of the cold war, when I often had nightmares of apocalypse.

taipei dreams

2005-07-31T23:35:00.000+09:00

I just published a bunch of photos from my trip to Taipei on flickr.com (see badge on right to view pics).

What an experience - I absolutely MUST go back to Taiwan before I die. Definitely on the agenda is an excursion to 九份 (Jiao Fen) where Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "City of Sadness" (非情城市) was filmed. It was also the town which inspired the backdrop for Miyazaki Hayao's "Spirited Away" (千と千尋の神隠し）.

The food was incredible, and the tea was fragrant and well-rounded (how come there are no equivalents of the profession of sommelier for the world of tea)? I stayed at a tucked-away, rundown business hotel in the Shuanglian district called "The Golden Star." On my second night, when I returned to the hotel at 3am or so, the desk clerk asked me in Japanese where I had been. So I said I was up late drinking tea with friends way high up in the mountains, enjoying the view of Taipei. I think he assumed I was sketchy, because he started to monologue about his wild youthful days hopping around different Asian cities and partying. He discoursed for a good half-hour on the practice of having "second" and "third" wives (i.e. mistresses), and how common it is. (E.g. my coworker at the sushi restaurant Hikaru had a father who lived in Hong Kong and a mother in Taipei, and they most definitely had one of these arrangements). "In Asia, all marriages are frauds." He then strangely asked me whether I was going to get married. I looked at him and asked him if he could give me a good reason why I should. He couldn't, so he finally let me take my leave.

Things I noticed:
Women in Taiwan generally don't wear as much make-up as in "Tokyo or Seoul
Bottled green tea in the convenience stores tend to be sweetened
Kids roam pretty freely - we saw one girl at the teahouse who was up with the 'rents until we left (3am). You'd never see that in tokyo, where the schools broadcast "children go home" songs at 5pm everyday. Lok says Japan is possibly the most OCD country he's ever visited, and I have to concur. What other place brings their women up to be ashamed of the sound of their own peeing such that most bathroom stalls have "white noise" machines to cancel out the frequencies of the offending cascade?
In some places in Taiwain, by contrast, you're supposed to dispose of used toilet paper in a wastebasket next to the toilet rather than flushing it down the john.

Had some more thoughts, but can't remember them all...will write more later.

what i'm reading, listening to, playing, +encounters with kuro

2005-07-22T09:51:00.000+09:00

Manga wa tetsugaku suru (Comics Philosophize) by Nagai Hitoshi
F shiki Ranmaru (Freudian Ranmaru) by Oh-shima Yumiko

both of those are for a paper I am to give in September on Freud 1/2 by Kawahara Izumi.

Listening to:

Antony and the Johnsons, I am a Bird Now
Soundtrack to Survive Style 5+
Lali Puna, I Thought I Was Over That - Rare, Remixed and B-Sides
Bebel Gilberto, Remixed

Playing some violin to get away from my desk. J.S. Bach Chaconne from Partita 2 (D minor, one of my favorite keys - the sound of cold earth tones, of north, and the warmth of wood. Maybe my fiddle just vibrates well to this key.).

ran into kuro the black cat on the stairs - he punched my big toe.

the night dances

2005-07-22T01:38:00.000+09:00

by sylvia plath

(how quickly we fall back into old habits, despite the deracinations of jetlag and well-meant resolutions. my insomnia is back. when i first read this poem, it was like an alien recognition that times like these, and the feelings they contain, can be expressed.)

A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!

And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?

Such pure leaps and spirals ----
Surely they travel

The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself ----
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off ----

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given

These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.
Nowhere.

traveling on the limited express(ion)

2005-07-22T00:56:00.000+09:00

flying to taiwan on saturday, back to tokyo on monday.
what i look forward to: the national palace museum, good food, learning more about good friends, being somewhere new where i've never been, but where someone i once loved deeply felt most at home.

creation myth

2005-07-22T00:23:00.000+09:00

pre-emptive nostalgia:

my pleasure arrives
like a guest, late for dinner and under-dressed,
looking for an impossible address in undisciplined streets.