The Infinite Tragedy of Awesome Bookstores

Going into a really good bookstore makes me strangely sad.  I was recently at San Francisco's Green Apple Books, and all I could think about was the fact that I could never hope to read all the great books that were laid out tantalizingly before me.  Thank god, then, that my Japanese reading is as poor as it is - Tokyo is full of bookstores of such size to bring on body-wracking sobs of desperation.  On top of that, they're cheap enough that the temptation to add just one more ridiculously cheap book to the pile can be overwhelming.

Today's haul was from the Book-Off in Akihabara, which has a small but cheap and, as you can see, occasionally spectacular English section.  All of the English books were Y200 each, except for the Alex Garland, which was Y105.  The Kobo Abe is a book I desperately needed, very specifically, for my current work.  The brown one you can't see is Natsume Soseki's Botchan, a classic of the transition from traditional to modern Japan - and both of those, again, Y200 each! The two Japanese hardcovers - by Ryu Murakami (top) and Haruki Murakami (bottom) were also Y105 each.  remix is an excellent, thoughtful hip hop and electronica magazine. Or, more properly, it was - it was recently bought and remade into a more commercial outlet.  I'm buying up all the back-issues I can get my hands on, particularly those featuring interviews with Japanese hip hop acts.  The issues here have interviews with Scha Dara Parr, Big Joe, Mic Jack Productions, and Muro (from 1999!).  The most expensive thing in the whole stack is at the very bottom, a remix featuring an interview with Sapporo's The Blue Herb.  And this was all just in an hour!  It's enough to drive you to drink - or at least that's my excuse.

"It Gets Better" - Living and Dying by the Stories of Ourselves

On my short trip back to the USA, I attended a funeral. The woman was a friend of my younger brother.  I had never met her.  She had, as the conventional saying goes, struggled with depression, and committed suicide after her insurance company forced her to switch her medication to a generic version of the drug she was taking.  Her parents' version of the story was that the switch caused her to slip back into severe depression and take her own life. Tragic events like this are common enough that psychopharmacologists are constantly working to figure out what's going on, using control groups and scientific methods.  The fact is, drugs may be amazingly effective at helping people with some kinds of psychological problems, but they're not flawless.

I didn't know this woman.  I don't know what she was like, or the contours of her problems.  But there were two hanging threads at the funeral that pointed to the need to treat depression with more than chemicals.  Her sister gave the eulogy, and a recurring theme was her sister's perfectionism and singular drive to succeed (in a bitter irony, the deceased had received her doctorate in pharmacology by the age of 24).  Very few Americans would consider this pathological, but as part of a complex including depression, you can imagine how destructive it could be.

There was a second element I only found out about after the funeral.  During the ceremony, I noticed an attractive young woman near the front of the chapel, seemingly taking things very hard.  She sat on the opposite side of the church from the girl's parents.  It wasn't until I spoke with my brother later that I found out this was the deceased woman's girlfriend.

One of the greatest historical sins of psychoanalysis is the way that, for a time, it legitimized blaming parents and their errors in judgment or action for everything from autism to epilepsy.  But however flawed and one-sided those conclusions might have been, they acknowledged a fundamental truth that is lost in treating the brain as a self-directed machine: that we are constructed not by some unified internal force, but by the actions of those around us.  I don't know anything about this girl or her parents, but this is a religious family in North Texas - a kind of Meccah for educated middle-class bigotry.  Even if her parents were fully supportive and loving, the broader context couldn't have made for an easy life.

Notes Towards a Cultural Geography of Tokyo

Gaston Bachelard

I don't want to make it a general habit to put my research notes up here, but for the moment I'm a bit out of pocket, and I suppose occasional glimpses of the work in progress can only help.  As some of my recent posts have suggested, what I'm gravitating towards right now is a full-scale psychoanalysis of Tokyo as a spacial/mental construct.  In SF, at the amazing Green Apple bookstore, I happened across a book that I think is going to be vital to that effort - Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.  I wanted to get down a few thoughts that the book has triggered so far.

First of all, Bachelard's book is about the way the poetic image shapes our experience of space, and since my chapter is going to be part of a book about hip hop, the obvious and correct move is to integrate readings of how space is represented in Japanese hip hop, both lyrically and musically.  There are the broad categories of space representation in hip hop as a whole, then the specific ways this is implemented in Japan.  Immediately, it occurs to me that space in hip hop has two particularly important modes - the space of the 'hood, and the space of the club, both of which emerge both sonically and lyrically.  There's the spacial extensiveness of bass music, which can either flood out over a city block, or reverberate inside the box of the club, filling the body, going inward.  In Japanese hip hop , the hood gets represented in the work of Shingo Nishinari (named after his Osaka neighborhood) and MSC (whose song "Shinjuku Running Dogs" talks about Kabukicho/Nishishinjuku as an "unsleeping terminal").

The issue of place as a site for identity attachments was never a major component of psychoanalysis, and Bachelard makes the vital point that this leads frequently to the confusion of shifts in location for time's passage in human development.  Time and space are, if not interchangeable, then mutually dependent.  So aside from the music and lyrics, the chapter needs to look at the history of the city itself, from a psychoanalytic perspective of digging down into the layers below the street, as I did in my recent post about the firebombings. The city of Tokyo is a storehouse of memory, even though (actually, specifically because) so much of it is newly built.

This is also significant because time, space, and identity are so closely linked in Tokyo, in Japanese society more generally, and in particular in the Japanese attitude toward subculture.  For many here, participation in a subculture is something literally 'left at the door' when moving from subcultural spaces to professional or more generally social spaces.  So, space becomes not just the marker but the root of changes in identity.

Top 25 Albums of 2010

It was a good year for music - maybe even great, though it's always hard to tell on these things,  since so much depends on how closely you're paying attention.  This year I was paying close attention, and here's what came out on top.

25. Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers

24. Sun Araw – Off Duty + Boat Trip

23. The Golden Filter – Voluspa

22. Yellow Swans – Going Places

21. Rene Hell – Porcelain Opera

20. Big Boi – Sir Lucius Leftfoot: The Return of Chico Dusty

19. Emeralds – Does it Look Like I'm Here

18. Antony and the Johnsons – Swanlights

17. Twin Shadow – Forget

16. Gold Panda – Lucky Shiner

15. How to Dress Well – Love Remains

14. Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

13. Dylan Ettinger – New Age Outlaws

12. Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

11. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

10. Philip Jeck – An Ark for the Listener

9. Oneohtrix Point Never – Returnal

8. Pocahaunted – Make it Real

7. Women – Public Strain

6. Caribou – Swim

5. James Blake – CMYK EP

4. Forest Swords – Dagger Paths

3. Die Antwoord - $0$ (CD Release)















2. Gonjasufi – A Sufi and A Killer

1. Yeasayer – Odd Blood

The Dream-Work, One

1) A man with vision split by technology - two different contact lenses - begins seeing a strange woman out of one eye (somehow just a reflection/construct of himself) until he ultimately encounters and makes love to her in a hall crafted of gilt and mirrors. Completely alone in the great hall, darkness around the edges, dark outside, the whole place dark and shadowy.

2) What the fuck? An ant with the gigantic, chitinous body of a grey spider? Ant’s thorax has grown a mock spider’s head?

3)Possible future study - the life world of north Texas.  Football games/watching on TV, shopping.  Intellectual effort expended on football, not music/culture.

The Geography of Surface and Depth: San Francisco and Tokyo

The San Francisco underground – at least the part of the BART that I rode inside the city proper – is really terrible. There are no maps near the ticket machines, no audible station announcements, no signs with station names easily visible from the train at stops. If you want to know how to make the train less convenient and accessible than the bus, come to San Francisco. It's one stark contrast with Tokyo, whose subway organization and labeling is relentlessly clear and logical, down to a multilingualism that makes it potentially transparent (after a certain learning curve) to an array of foreigners.

The contrasts in the two cities' landscapes are layered and transverse. At the very surface, SF is a beautifully mystified city – a mosaic of murals, creative storefronts, beautiful century-old brass scrollwork, window displays, public art. By contrast, while I don't have a great deal of personal grounds for comparison, others before me have described Tokyo as one of the drabbest, if not outright ugliest, of the great cities. Its parks are scraggly and unkempt, and as much as they are romanticized by a certain American subset who fetishize their “postmodernity,” the unregulated trammel of racing neon lights, dirty plastic mascots, and frantically spinning tin signs amount more than anything to an unending eyesore. There are the struggles of a small few humanizers – graffiti artists and creative boutique retailers fighting the grey concrete and off-white tile, the textural regularity of the cheap and mass-produced buildings – but the fight, against indifferent ward governments and citizens long cowed into aesthetic submission, is one they can't win.

But at another level, the roles reverse. Beneath its surface vulgarity, for instance if we travel the paths of its streets and experience their flow, or even just look at a map of any random section of the 23 wards, we can see that Tokyo's humanity and chaos are inscribed at a deeper level. The map to the right happens to be of Shibuya, but shows a familiar pattern – a major hub towards which major streets and minor lanes alike converge, inconsistently, with kinks and swerves, revealing the trace of pedestrians and rickshaws and palanquins carving them by consensus over the course of a century or three. Streets bend and spiral, both at the level of the block and the level of the city as a whole.

Eyedea - I am right, and wrong.

So, it turns out Eyedea really did overdose.  I speculated about this possibility previously. I just came from the funeral of a friend of my brother's who committed suicide after a long history of depression and, I'm again going to speculate, difficulties with her family related to her sexuality (this is in Texas). After having seen tragedy firsthand, I can only refine my point to say that some people, artists or not, are closer to the dark edge of life, engaged in a more profound struggle with difficulty more than others.  I'm not the sort ever to even dabble in dangerous drugs, much less willfully take my own life, but I can say I have enough experience with the dark side to know that sometimes you can't control it.  So, peace to all those who fight.