fiction

michiko’s life

O.

Sunday morning, her eyes suddenly open at 11 AM, Michiko awoke with a tugging sense of melancholy that caught her off guard. Never one to indulge herself in feelings, rarely put off balance by the mundanities others seemed to constantly battle with, she prided herself in her ability to rise above those demons that pulled others down.

But today, a nagging sense of unease with her life made her wake with a start. Strange, since everything was in order:

1) Sector 7A had been restored to a lower than expected unhappiness gradient after factoring in post-climate change seasonal adjustments.

2) The sex with Hiro was great, she was really able to open up with him in a new way since they both agreed that neither wanted a relationship.

3) She regularly saw her friends which gave her a vague (which was enough for her) sense of belonging.

4) The new BeDoTa–ya opened just a few stops from her on the Kourakuen line. Household goods from literally underground antique shops from the Kreuzberg district of Berlin were now available immediately in Tokyo.

Maybe her melancholy was the result of the slight fever she had been running throughout the last couple of days, or because of the unnatural, at least by pre-climate change standards, cold and foggy weather in the Tokyo summertime. Or possibly from the hangover due to the party at Club Blue in Omotesando last night. Whatever it was, the sense of angst was unfamiliar and disorienting.

First the memory then the physical sensation.

First the recollection of deep peace after a particularly intense orgasm had at precisely 2:05 PM when 20 years old with a 17 year old lover on a summer day on a tatami mat near Ikebukero station with the orange tree growing outside the window. Then the slight electric tingle in her right foot on this foggy cold Sunday morning.

First the curious sensation of wondering if her memory was actually of her, so long ago, throwing snowballs in Kamakura. Then the twitch in 0.3 second intervals in the 3rd finger of her left hand.

Can she really imagine herself as the same person who inhabited a particular physical space and time in the past? Hasn’t her body already replaced whoever that was, made up of whatever combination of cells?

(Explanatory note on Michiko’s Life: This episodic story is an on-going outlet for my inner Tokyo woman, an idealized super-modern, sleek, intelligent, and perpetually in motion sophisticate who participates in a highly secret government operation that astoundingly benefits the population despite popular cynicsm. Michiko questions herself mercilessly but only on those occasions which truly require it. She is the ultimate non-neurotic).

dj st. tropez summer dance mix

My alter-ego DJ St. Tropez just put together a summer mix. While St. Tropez, the place, is the embodiment of summer, the DJ has a pretty teutonic idea of a party. The result being a mix that is trying so hard to reach the beach but in fact has something of a tough time leaving Munich.

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Here’s the podcast.

ADSR disco

Simian Mobile Disco’s Attack Decay Sustain Release is just too much fun, and referencing an ADSR envelope satisfies my inner geek sooo much.

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blobjects and pulsating icons

So, I’ve had no time for blogging recently. Basically every free minute is pumped into getting ready for the performance Deric and I are doing Friday night at the Mission Creek Festival’s Collision series, as Kunsole.

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We’ve built a live video system to be blasted huge on the back wall with three dimensional color blobjects, viewed through an ocular frame. And a glowing disc sits on the floor: occasionally we get up and turn it and a series of dark icons slowly rotate across another projection screen, at an angle to the wall. All the while, I’m playing, live, a new piece I wrote last week, something I’m actually rather happy with. Very dark, tectonic, glacial music, until about 12 minutes in, when it breaks into pointillistic sound objects. Think: glowing low-flying zeppelins floating through an undiscovered urban landscape, flown with nautical controls, its skin decorated with strange aphoristic texts.

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I’m somewhat pleased with the way this has all turned out, here’s hoping we don’t get any technical surprises Friday night. If you’re in town, come see us. Doors open at 7, New Langton Arts, San Francisco.

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chandler burr

Born in southeast Texas, gay, lived in Tokyo and Paris, studied economics in school, Chandler Burr now writes restrained and densely evocative prose about fragrance.  He’s poised for a Butt Magazine profile any day now.

I was happy when he affirmed my scent of choice, writing, “With Dior Homme, IFF perfumeur Olivier Polge has not only created a stunning scent. He has (under Hedi Slimane’s creative direction; Slimane also designed the bottle, which is perfect, the most handsome masculine fragrance bottle in, oh, the history of the world) created what may some day be seen as a seminal piece of work. Polge has created a subtly spectacular iris. [...] Iris, handled correctly, is liquid good taste. It also, incidentally, does not exist. It is impossible for technical reasons to wring any natural scent from iris flowers, and all iris scents are created with synthetic molecules.”

Here are some choice quotes from his column in NYT’s The Moment:

“As has been widely noted, the definitions of “natural” and “organic” are more theological than empirical, and “All-Natural” in its fanatic form is the Left’s creationism. There is nothing wrong with synthetic raw materials in scent, architecture, painting, or music.” 

“Ropion openly played on the raw, green, untamed aspects of tuberose, its petals hung heavily with thick perfume like pounds of pearl necklaces roping a neck, mixed with the violent, oozing, fresh green sap of tender stems scissored in two. Benaim, by contrast, has taken tuberose, stripped away its weighty, narcotic aspects and, like an expert olfactory pastry chef, deftly folded it into a sunny, glamorous perfume that is as flawlessly powdered as the face of the movie star at the table next to you, lunching on the roof deck of the Beverly Hills Peninsula.”

“This is Chanel’s version of the masculine cliché, the scent equivalent of “Spiderman 2” and an endlessly repackaged formula. The masculine cliché smells, always, of generic citrus and generic spice with a bit of tin-can metallic. Like a Hollywood action blockbuster, the ingredients are invariable: Throw in some linalyl acetate for fake bergamot, dihydrogeraniol for fake lemon, dihydromercenol for laundry detergent (tennis player in shower) and galaxolide for cheap synthetic musk. You’re done. (There’s nothing wrong with synthetic materials; the failure here is lack of imagination.)”

deconstructing barry

I’m of the camp that believes style speaks volumes. A sweep of the hand, a turn of phrase, intention is signaled even when the attempt is made to cover it. A wealth of information is there if we know how to read it.

Andrew Delbanco, a literary critic at Columbia, has written an excellent article titled “Deconstructing Barry” in The New Republic which parses and interprets Barack Obama’s literary style. I haven’t read any of Obama’s books; while I strongly support him I have never really been interested in politics enough to actually read a book by someone running for office. But when Delbanco quotes the following lines from Obama, I have to admit, I am intrigued:

By the time I reached high school, I was playing on Punahou’s teams, and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn’t just have to do with sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn’t back it up. That you didn’t let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions–like hurt or fear–you didn’t want them to see.

Delbanco describes Obama’s language, at one point, as, “open and unresolved, the sentences organized around pairs of sentiments or arguments that exert equal force against each other–a reflection of ongoing thinking rather than a statement of settled thoughts.” After the seemingly unending presidency of Bush, the idea that we could have someone in the White House who is an active thinker, and seems to genuinely care about language, sounds like a crazy luxury. But as it is with so much in this country, we are offered the choice between feast or famine: the extraordinarily gifted Barry Obama or the mentally incontinent, perpetually angry McCain.

update:  In an article in today’s Salon magazine, Laura Miller states that, “Obama himself went through a period of ‘devouring’ the work of Nietzsche while living in New York.” 

what a way to start the day

Episome, by Otomo Yoshihide, Bill Laswell, and Yoshida Tatsuya gets the blood flowing at 7 in the morning.

recent listening

Tuesday night I was transported to France for a few hours. We were off to see a concert by Benoit Delbecq and Francis Houle at the French Consul’s residence, with the French flag very proudly flapping, up near Alta Plaza park. I could feel less embarrassed than normal about my lack of French skills since this time at least we were on American soil.

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Benoit Delbecq provided subtle and intricately woven left hand low percussive lines, with careful preparations inside the piano, while the right hand was trying its best to not go off into outer space with Ornette Coleman inspired riffs.

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Canadian Francois Houle played the clarinet like a piece of wood and metal, sometimes playing two at the same time. Long improvised lines wound tightly around Delbecq’s controlled percussion, then suddenly and unexpectedly both Delbecq and Houle would hit on the same note at precisely the same time ushering in tightly synced melodic duets.

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All in all, a nice performance. Maybe a bit subdued but such is the nature of an intimate show in the chandeliered reading room of the French Consul’s residence.

The only downside was the socioeconomic vertigo Jano and I experienced upon arriving back at our little Tendernob apartment.