FundamentallySound Blog

With all the talk of who is correctly seeing/feeling/touching/tasting Japan going on out there, I started re-reading my journals that I still have (some were lost in a huge computer crash on my Powerbook 1400 in January of 2001) and found a few entries I had penned about that country while living there.

Novemeber 12, 1999
tokyo
1. i own a mobile phone that looks like a small plastic toy but in fact allows me to communicate with people all over the planet.
2. as an american i cannot understand the japanese concept of group harmony as being more important than individuality.
3. i work with people who do not reflect on their lives.
4. i am more popular amongst my friends in the US now than when i lived there.
5. the confusion i feel in and about this country is comfortable for me.

January 17, 2000
tokyo
back in america, you never wonder what people think.

they shout their thoughts,

opinions hitting you from all directions, sharp as knives.

but here silence fills the room,

thick as water in the mississippi river. it coats my thoughts,

my anxieties about

your true feelings.

January 23, 2000
tokyo
I like Tokyo but I don’t love it. I don’t love the country or feel any deep connection with the people. I’m not interested in ancient Japanese traditions, and I while I would like to learn the language, it’s not a huge priority for me. Yes, it’s a difficult language and I guess it’s very interesting, at least to some people, but I get along better without it, as I believe I prefer the personalities of Japanese people who have learned English compared to the dyed in the wool monolingual Japanese.

June 5, 2001
tokyo
(These passive-aggressive Japanese, they’re beating me at my own game).

June 6, 2001
tokyo
Japan:
1. It’s a social pressure-cooker that might blow at any time.
2. It’s a place that can support the existence of public baths, where sex doesn’t enter the mind of anyone who goes there. How strange.

June 23, 2001
tokyo
1. Domestic harmony creates aesthetic self-satisfaction.
2. Robert duckworth will settle for nothing less than world domination, regardless of the cost.
3. I have to escape from this country before it’s too late.
4. Tokyo is a claustraphobic city physically and socially.

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Seconds of Salvation, a new collaborative audio/video project by myself and The Mittens Brigade (aka Rémi Gérard-Marchant) will be performed live at The Lab on December 9.

Expect lots of ohééééééé (clung) clang ohééééé     é      é          é
(dhmmmmdanhgmmmmmmmmm)

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"He has a really good instinct for loneliness."

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Seeing Drew Daniel sing Coil's Anal Staircase while wearing a wiccan hood, his voice filtered through some black-magic DSP then later segueing into Big Booty Bitches was a real treat last night. I think some people are disappointed that the new Soft Pink Truth album is nothing but covers, but SPT is doing it so smartly that distinctions between authenticity, covers, remixes, recontextualizations, etc, just get so messy that to try to work through them conceptually misses the point that it's a lot more fun to just shake your booty to the music. Soft Pink truth just keeps getting softer, pinker, and, depending on whom you ask, the rockists or the anti-rockists, more (or less) true all the time.

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How about that? That's one of my thoughts. I have dozens of them. If you take a bunch of short ideas. and arrange them so that they overlap, that's one long idea. That's a thought. One time one short idea is slightly ahead of another and another time it's not, but they always overlap, that's the rule. So you get a large number of different thoughts, because one time one short idea is slightly ahead of another and another time it's not.

Artists exploring text-based sound pieces, especially those who were big in the 80's, seem more relevant than ever. Laurie Anderson's Big Science album looks to be nearly prescient in this post 9/11 world. I listened to it again for the first time in years a couple of months back and I remember thinking that it seemed like it finally had the depth that I could never find in it before, not because it wasn't written in there but because the world had not caught up with Anderson's vision of it yet. Maybe now it has.

When justice is gone, there is always force. Here come the planes, they're American planes.

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Yesterday was filled with lots of walking, talking, eating, and drinking. Thanks Adam.

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Most people at the turn of the twenty-first century have forgotten that there was a time in Japan before World War II when Japanese nationalists showed an Asianist face to the world's Muslims, whom they wanted to befriend as allies in the construction of a new Asia under Japanese domination. The rise of Japan was a destabilizing factor that attracted Muslim activists who wanted to cooperate with the "Rising Star of the East" against the Western empires, accelerating contacts between Japan and the world of Islam from vast regions of Eurasia and North Africa.

This is a fascinating article on the relationship between late Meiji Japan and Islam, by Selçuk Esenbel.

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I'm so ready to get out of America. When I close my eyes and dream of places to live, the first to come to mind is Antwerp, Belgium. I have friends who also dream of living there. It's a small quiet city with a thriving art scene, beautiful architecture (the central train station is breathtaking), and great transportation. I could prepare my music there and then travel to Holland for the performances... It's a nice dream anyhow.

It's situated within comfortable distance of Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. I feel I could really get on with my work there rather than fighting with the constant political and social distractions I feel here in America. This schizoid mess of a country is REALLY getting on my nerves these days.

Maybe I should start a "Free Roddy From America!" webpage, taking donations (via PayPal, of course) to cover my plane ticket and a few months rent (it's cheap there folks!), while I get my feet on the ground. Huh. Maybe I *really* should do this.

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Julia Christensen has been traveling around America, looking at the Big Boxes that pass for commercial space, and is documenting how they're being re-used in originally unintended ways. She's going to speak at Mills College this Thursday, should be a very interesting lecture.

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I have never felt much allegiance to America. Having grown up in the deep south of this country, from a young age I was rather appalled by the normative culture around me. Stuffing as much Gingsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, William Blake, and Nietzsche into my head all the while listening to Velvet Underground from Junior High School on over the next few years confirmed my young but ever-growing distrust in casual assumptions and systematic conventions. At my age now, the Beats just seem maddeningly inarticulate, William Blake too vague, Nietzsche rather demented. But the qualities they all shared are still meaningful. And now more than ever I am frightened by the majority opinion. I've always liked this quote by Nietzsche, seems appropriate for these days:

"I mistrust all systemisers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity."

- Friedrich Nietzsche from The Twilight of the Idols

Oh, and I still love the Velvet Underground as much as I ever did.

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Yesterday had apocalyptic overtones. I woke in the morning to huge thunderclouds right over my house and rain falling at right angles. The whole day was wet, cold, and everybody in the city had a look of mute despair. I wasn't able to watch or listen to the news all day, and only caught a brief glimpse of the front-page of the New York Times before feeling so disgusted with what it had to report that I could read no more. More frightening than any conspiracy theory about voter fraud is the realization that this is what America legitimately decided.

I gave a music performance about it last night at the Jiffy-Scuttler. It was something of a truncated version as I was having doubts as to whether a club with a bunch of loud people talking at the bar was really the place to be presenting the work, but I think people got it. It was really my first piece of overtly political art, and it felt good. And it wasn't about changing people's minds, it was about grieving the events of the last couple of days.

Thanks to everybody who let me get recordings of them over the past two weeks. Here are a few of the samples I used:
Nathan (ex-pat Floridian in Amsterdam)
Mitch (San Francisco)
Frank (Germany)
Radim (Slovakia)
Rémi (France)
Roman (Czech ex-pat in San Francisco)
Aki (ex-pat Osaka-jin in San Francisco)
Seamus (Mancunian ex-pat in Amsterdam)

Blevin and Wobbly's sets both rocked, I don't understand why people weren't dancing. Maybe it was the weather or just the general malaise of the city.

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I left America for some years, then came back, like someone stupidly trying to make an abusive relationship work. Now, like so so many others, I feel it is probably time to think of leaving again. Not soon, as moving does require quite a bit of money, but the idea and desire is there once again. Nick echoes my sentiment this morning eloquently in this entry. As does Robert (maybe a little less eloquently, but exactly how I feel too).

In the meantime, I'll keep enjoying the best that America still has in San Francisco, this is a city full of beautiful people. And whatever happens to the rest of the country, at least I've got this 7x7 square mile city to call home, for now.

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