Oh, Hon and I both bought Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds from Junkudo, a huge bookstore in Osaka that might only have about ten shelves of books in English, but which sees fit to stock Toni Negri’s Time for Revolution — nice. And we’re gonna see Brian Wilson in concert the very day we arrive back in Sydney. How’s that? Smile that Smile.
November 2004 Archives
Yesterday we spent an amazing afternoon in Asakusa, Tokyo, in a street containing specialised shops that will sell you everything you’d need if you were setting up a restaurant. Plastic window display food? Check. (The companies that do this are insanely cool — thanks, Lily, for the recommendation.) Display cabinets for said plastic food? Check. Uniforms for the chefs and waiting staff? Check. Chopsticks? Check. Bento boxes? Check. An interior designer that specialises in restaurants? Check. This might betray some super-nerdiness on my part, but wandering down this street has kinda been the highlight of my trip. (That and finding the “Salaryman Heroes II: Ultraman” package, which features lovingly rendered collectible toy dioramas of my favourite Japanese superhero, Ultraman, engaged in all sorts of mundane office-worker activities, like pouring beer for his monster-of-the-week boss, or falling asleep on the subway, his head resting on the shoulder of his monster-of-the-week neighbour.)
This kind of aggregation somehow reminded me of the unimaginably huge second-hand clothing shop that Hon showed us in Osaka — every item of clothing was sorted into insanely detailed categories (e.g. “bright green 80’s puffy jackets”). Knowing the arbitariness of these categorisations, and yet revelling in their flawless execution, gives me great pleasure.
Hon, Lena and I wandered into a “love hotel” (a hotel specially built for illicit, quickie trysts) in Osaka, just to see how tacky it was (it was maginificent — photos soon). Usually you don’t even have to deal with staff at the counter — it’s all automated to uh, lubricate the anonymity of the whole thing. Well anyway, we’re sneaking around while I take photos, and suddenly this guy comes out at the counter and says, “Sorry, we don’t have a room for three people”. Ahahahahahahahahaha….
I’m in Japan! Crazy! In the Tobu department store in Tokyo, there’s an incredible food section that completely outshines any kind of food fetishism that I have ever seen on the planet. The most expensive, sweet smelling strawberries I’ve ever seen. The most perfect specimens of fruit and vegetables ever. It’s almost disturbing, in a food-eugenics kind of way. More soon.
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Right now I’m in the Apple Store in Osaka, using a Mac for the first time in ages — hallelujah.
A tip: Belkin’s iPod Media Reader is a piece of shit that basically doesn’t work. I bought one so I could transfer my pix from my camera to higher-capacity storage without having to lug a laptop around or burn them to CD in a photo/camera store. But no, it drains the iPod battery to zero in a matter of seconds, whether it was fully charged or not, quitting the process in the uh, process. I don’t think I’ve been as disappointed by a product in my life.
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Public space in Japan is an interesting thing. Of course I’ve only shallowly scratched the surface in the few days I’ve been here, but it’s quite noticeable (to me at least) that Japanese people spend a lot of time standing, rather than sitting, in public. There are very few benches or seats anywhere in public. Where there are places, they’re hard, and often shiny. People respond to this kind of foreclosure in interesting ways. Homeless people tend to create their own “shanty-houses” out of cardboard boxes in the cities I’ve visited, which never really happens in Sydney, where there are (increasingly endangered) types of enclosures that can be more easily made to accomodate human life. And the phenomenon of Japanese teenagers practicising their group dance routines in front of public mirrors or any shiny surface is a sight to behold — too cool for words. Totally unselfconscious.
I’m at the Sydney Design Symposium, and in a session on “cultural discipline”, Norm Sheehan’s been talking about indigenous knowledges being disciplined out of existence. He just said the most amazing thing about the perceived inauthenticity of Australian culture — “if you want to feel at home, it’s simple: just stop being colonial”.
The old comrades just seem to be fading away: Adrian’s dead. I hadn’t seen him for years, and never knew him very well, but by some weird coincidence I’d been thinking about him recently. Ten years ago, I was telling him about the argument I’d had with Richard Stallman, the open source guru, about Apple, interfaces, open source software and intellectual property. I thought Stallman’s movement against proprietary systems was important, but that his boycott of Apple was somewhat misplaced.
“You know,” said Adrian, “I don’t care about that stuff. I just care about how much Apple pay their workers.” I must say that in the last ten years, I’ve built my intellectual and political investments pretty much in direct opposition to the letter of what Adrian said — I can’t stress enough that the effects of Capital’s “management” of knowledge are overlooked at one’s peril — but I respected the desire for grounding on which he insisted, and that has always stayed with me.
“I don’t know about poststructuralism,” he once said to me. “It’s very interesting, but if you accept all that stuff, what happens to the Marxist account of alienation?” Sure, it’s posed in a way that tends to echo the somewhat pointless problematics of classical philosophy, but it’s a challenge that any radical take on “the subject” would do well to remember.
We originally all thought he was some trot spy, but you know, he was all right. I liked his funny hats. And the way he knew he was good looking was amusing. I’m sure those of you who knew him better will have better things to say.
The sweet smell of roasting capsicums is wafting into the study, and I’m struggling to find a coherent voice in which I can write about all the stuff that’s going on right now. A lot of my work with Storybox was about negotiating distinctions between public and private spaces, and it’s ironic that in the midst of it I found myself incapable of blogging. Now that the project is over, I’ll have to slowly take stock. Suffice to say that I’ve been continually amazed at people’s courage to share intense stories, and that what I always expected to be an ambivalent process has tied me in a bunch of ethical knots.
