Sugardisaster

Land of the Living

The common belief is that it’s easy to criticize, that it’s easy to hate, but the truth is that it is not effortless to be negative: it takes work. It may in fact be even more tiring than being positive, though the scientific data on that is still inconclusive. At the biological level, there is no judgment, energy consumption doesn’t differentiate between good and bad, so waste is merely waste, for good or ill. So the Buddha espouses the Middle Way, which is not to say in between Yes and No, an indifferent Maybe, but rather more akin to the point of a triangle, a high ground connected to, but removed from, extremes, be they monkish or lavish.

Make no mistake, reaching this goal is work. It too expends energy. Ensconced in diamonds or wrapped in rags, as long as you are reaching for something in the dark, why not reach intelligently, rather than flailing about.

Tokyo - Land of the Dead

Who are you happy face?

When distance is the only tangible thing you’ve got between you, and all that matters is the ephemeral light, communication is key. Here are a smattering of the people met in Japan who- more than the place itself make it memorable, who make me want to go against all my instincts and look back, behind me, on roads already traveled, and give me pause to shout: You are how I have gotten this far. Follow your bliss and I will follow you anywhere (except back to Tokyo…heh)!

246 X Shibuya

The ancient Greeks believed in the Omphalos, which is both a thing and an idea. While the “thing” is one of a few actual stone artifacts located at Delphi, Jerusalem and other religious mystery sites, the idea is that of the “navel” or bellybutton. If you’ve been to the Delphi Museum and seen one of these very large urns, you will know that they are generally crisscrossed with intricate web-like patterns, all lines originating from one point, expanding out and contracting back in, perpetually interconnected, though likely unaware (if awareness even plays into it) of this interconnectedness. Though this idea was not solely a Greek one, but can be found throughout various cultures that are both long dead and still extant, maybe it is the direct experience I have in the Greek isles which makes this hit home. That or the fact that these urns, or in their smaller more portable forms, chalices, likely held wine, or some other intoxicant (a distilled amanita muscaria perhaps?), which induced the kind of religious fervor that likely got Zeus drunk enough to screw around with the hot, olive-skinned Mediterranean ladies and have babies emerge from his thigh (Dionysus) and head (Athena).

This is where the idea for HESO came from, my anachronistic love of Greek mythology. And interconnectedness. And wine.

Actually it was probably after I was interconnected with some lovely ladies in Greece while drinking wine that I came up with the thought to create a culture magazine in Japan. Obvious, that.

The point being that wherever you are, and wherever I am, no matter how far apart, we are together. Jeez, that feels a bit too much like a Beatles’ song, though maybe you get the point. Whether it be hitching on the crowded streets of Shibuya or walking the lonely backroads of Mongolia, just look down at the only thing that everyone – no matter how different they may appear to be- has: your belly button, and know that you are not alone.

In Your Dreams You Are A God

Give me the dark, warm and buttery thick

Give me whiskey in a glass, big chunks of ice

Give me a snare and kick drum, and two sticks to fuse the gaps

Give me palm trees at dusk, and a place from which to hear them

Give me bloody death by arrows and knives and dogs gnashing teeth

Give me Lou Reed’s guitar solo in What Goes On for eternity

Give me that feel, fingers through hair, breath on my neck, sun on my back

Give me the sea and her smell, and skin taut from salt and wind

Give me permanence and control and the eye of the storm

Give me the summer sun, the winter moon, the lion and the snake

Give me room for I am a continent, massive as the oceans

Give me belly laughs as my navel is a tectonic plate

Give me solace as Godzilla is my sweet redheaded stepchild who eats Chinas at Teatime and farts earthquakes

Give me my arteries, worm holes to the Beginning of Time, through which flow T-Rex-sized hemoglobin to my heart, the mother of all blackholes, which gave birth to the Dark.

Give me love, but as a piece of art, behind glass, safe for posterity

Give me no thing more, cause I’m empty save for the light and the dark

Give me peace, for I am the War Against Reality.

Tokyo Main(Sky)Line

Tokyo is concrete, electric, sublime, frenetically interconnected in ways neural synapses are jealous of. Though after a while of prowling the backalleys and neon-lit boulevards, the tiny 5-seat bars and the swanky Roppongi clubs, the Ginza haute couture, the Harajuku freak show cosplay and the Kabukicho sexshops you slowly start to realize there is a disease running rampant as a misguided synapse, a freak malignancy most people have that they live with in silent submission, or maybe it’s remission – the look-busy-while-not-actually-doing-all-that-much-disease called isogi-byo. Though I do realize this sickness could be an epidemic in the making in every major metropolis, what I see before me everytime I forget where I am when I awaken is a rapidly aging country of 125 million conformists with particularly bad strain of the virus who have lost their bliss. That or never followed it in the first place. The disease is spreadable by coming in contact with too many hungover salarymen, commuting via the vast network of sardine-can packed trains and subways, everyone hypnotized by their supercharged mobile phones (keitai-byo) and/or the latest ipod, where smug perverts (chikan) feel up Louis Vuitton ensconced women or are accused of such and won’t doing anything about it, working 3 parttime jobs (baito-byo), milling about in coffee shops between jobs, snapping photos of people who I think I’ll never see again, yet constantly do, tumbling around Shibuya with the rich teenagers and buying beers and Chinese Tangerines for the bums laid up against Gap and Banana Republic, and then comes the rain, trying to wash all the Tsukiji fish guts down the drain, the Kabukicho multitudes of shy, unmarried men (hazukashi-byo) pouring out of sexshops open for business right behind Police stations and City Hall, where the public servants go to get serviced, the Asian version of the greasy spoon boasting whale sashimi, horse sashimi, what could be dolphin skin soup with grated garlic and ginger, empty Suntory and Black Nikka premier whiskey bottles lining alleyways you’ll never know, but from which you smell egg breakfasts at 6 in the morning at people’s shoebox apartments who are somehow familiar, you’ve seen them in a dream, you’ve known them in a past life, at some level somehow there’s a shared camaraderie, slowly watching the price of tuna rise above the price of gas and saying fuck it, ordering some anyway, eating it with disposable chopsticks (waribashi-byo) made from yet another clearcut forest in Southeast Asia which adds to the flooding of 1/3rd of Bangladesh, and overall getting blinded by the morning sun finally overcoming the rainy season clouds and 60s era neon so all this blurs together into a kind of silent beautiful despair. Rife with the gooey, sexy, glossy stuff, Tokyo is an addiction. We’re all mainlining.

Winterwear

Loudspeakers and bullhorns, explosions and genocides, ladybugs and dragonflies, breezes and whispers, mikan & cherry blossoms, soba and grated shoga, chrysanthemum sushi and ochazuke, bamboo and mini maple leaves…all these things intermingle whenever I think you might be slowly stretching out another one of your beautiful days into the coming spring nights warmer and warmer all the time. It’s nice knowing that regardless of voicemail and other illicit rambles lost in the ether and the inevitable email address shuffle, that you are in the world breathing beautiful light into people’s lives.

Downtown Los Angeles From 1000 Feet

Jack Bauer can do it with his eyes closed, TC from Magnum P.I. makes it look easy, Murdock on The A-Team was supposedly insane and he could do it, yet flying a helicopter is anything but easy. Once you get up there, over all the little two-legged ants running around their infernal mazes in gas-guzzling SUVs, you realize that you have the potential to project yourself faster -in any direction- than you’ve ever gone. You, in a 4-cylinder rotor-driven machine with no doors that doesn’t actually want to fly. No, all it wants to do is to spin like a top and explode on something. It’s quite something to go up in one as a passenger and hang out the side snapping photos from 500-1000 feet up. Yet it’s quite another to do it with the childhood friend you used to cut classes with to go guzzle bottles of tequila while parked in a big brown stalker van, who intermittently breaks into NWA lyrics flying over Compton and wonders aloud if the seatbelts will hold (while making hard right turns over power lines, vats of chemicals and the 405 freeway).

The pilot

Meet Matt, gentleman, scholar of life, helicopter pilot, born two years 1 day after yours truly. During my last trip to the the west coast he was generous, wily and resolved enough to get the two of us up in the air in the two-seat Robinson R22, usually hovering at around 500 feet, over Long Beach, the RMS Queen Mary (the white dome situated next to which was the onetime home of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose), landing us in an airstrip in Compton, and finally circling the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles at an altitude of well over 1000 feet.

Rising up from Long Beach Harbor, where the moist ocean air meets the dry desert wind it’s hard to tell if it’s smog or low-lying cloud cover you’re flying out of as the rush overtakes you. Suddenly you can see the whole picture, you can take in the whole view. You can see the true desert sprawl of Los Angeles county, ranging from the watering post port of Long Beach (the world’s largest), the rusted wagon wheel that are the oil derricks and processing plants of Long Beach, the flat cellblock architecture of ghostown Compton, the recent development of subdivision communities in what used to be orange groves, the old railyards and storage facilities rotting like a wasteland of metal and dust, over the merciless postwar housing boom, the showdown on main street of the Wilshire Corridor and there you are, approaching the hills to the north, there is the oasis of downtown shimmering in the heat.

Truth is, once taken in from the sky at 100 mph, these seemingly fragmented and disparate wastelands coalesce into a kind of monument to human adaptability. Of stamina and the will to overcome the elements. Hemmed in to the north by the forested hills, the east by the Mojave and the west by the Pacific, LA has always attracted the best and the wost of all things: weather, natural disasters, riots, sports teams, etc. Now long since established, the trick will be not to merely overcome the elements (mudslides, wildfires, smog) as the next generation of Angelenos awakens to this desert bloom of a city’s socio-political, environmental and economic problems, but rather to harmonize this area the Spanish first named, “Bahia de los Fumos” (Smoke Bay) as far back as the 16th century, for the next 500 years.

Thanks for the perspective Matt.

I have dreams about Dim Sum sometimes, strange L.A. Chinatown fantasies with roasted ducks hanging in steamed windows and big oak tree butcher blocks worn smooth and bowled in the center from years of cleaving and carving, back tables behind secret doors, huge lazy susans revolving egg drop soups and wontons past immaculate jade green dragon eyes, the statues and goldfish stare out from their respective stations, patiently watching and keeping tabs on the suspicious men in trench coats. I eat from the 6, 8, 10 plates in front of me, while the sun sets pink and night sinks in, oblivious to the world around, while money, sex and lies all change hands. I am a detective on a case I have no business with. I am entering a world I don”t belong in. I play dumb. If only to stave off the water torture, hookers with razors dug deep in their vaginas, rat-poisoned oolong – death is a welcome release here. The street outside, crowded with cops, transvestites, triads, jazz clubs, slaughterhouses, opium, children for sale, like the duck on the plate in front of me, Broadway is the end for most. I suck on the marrow of mallard bones, trying to divine some vestige of flight knowledge. Know when to run, but more importantly how to. Use your wings. Rose whiskey, soda back. My fortune cookie reads, “We know who you are. Escape is impossible.” I rise, instinctively reaching for the metallic bulge tucked in the rear of my pants, but something freezes me. Something I didn’t expect. Not punks with cheap Uzis, Chinese mafia members blocking the entrance, no cooks fingering their razor sharp butcher knives, no secret society of female assasins, but a child, a little girl, sullen and beautiful as the yellow rose she holds out to me and suddenly, it flashes before my eyes: I’m back in Yokohama, new year’s 2000, Chinatown, the narrow alleyway all aflash with smoke and the din of firecrackers as the new year rings in, I see her. The spitting image of the girl here, but older, 20, maybe 21, coming my way, slow motion like Maggie Cheung in Wong Kar-wei’s In The Mood For Love, golden eyes gleaming askance, dressed in tight blue silk, ass-length black hair down, intermingling in the gunpowder smoke, dragon wind and ramen steam.

Here she is, coming towards me, and out of the shadows a blaze of leather and suglasses, pony tails and scars, Resevoir Dogs black suits tailing her, snatching her up, whisking her slender, come-hither hips down a dark side alley, me frozen, the hand holding a yellow rose whips behind her body like a mannequins, fingers akimbo, a slo-motion macro zoom of the puddle swirled in oils, her figure reflected disappearing, the rose drops, melts into the thick blackness. A thug stares my way, wags a finger no no no, grins maniacally and vanishes, but wait, he reemerges, intent on something, the grin gone, he whips back his jacket and reaches for the shiny black thing slung over his shoulder hanging heavy, grasps it like he grabs anything he knows too well: money, a sack of heroin, his cock. I turn running, my jacket flapping in the wind, grasping for my own cock. Always load your gun before going into battle. I spy an open doorway, duck in, turn a corner and freeze against the wall. My heart pounds, thumping like it”ll break through the back of my body, the brick wall, hell and back. I see a shadow pass by, a baby cries somewhere, and I wake up in a sweat in my bed in…in where the hell am I again? Los Angeles, Yokohama? Chinatown somewhere. Always Chinatown.

Always the same this one. He never turns that corner, but everyday he gets a bit closer, and everyday I see a bit more of her face, the taut and subtle lines of her dress, silk creasing as she”s abducted. Always the same. This time though I’ve got something in my hand: one petal of a yellow rose out of which tumbles the same ominous fortune. Always the same, tonight just closer to doom.