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Saturday, July 30, 2005

Other words I enjoyed this week 

pinata
vu ja de
Signac
D'Anunzio
Pythian
Deus absconditus
Auchentoushan
Aratus of Sicyon
Sun Yat-sen
cherish a serpent
sine loco, anno, vel nomine
proprioceptive

Words that I enjoyed this week 

意志薄弱
断酒
逆恨み
血も涙もない
金玉火鉢

樽俎折衝
夏橙
井の中の蛙
蛇の道は蛇

Polypunk 


Yo, Yo, Yo[da]!!!
DJ Bobofete in da grabble scratchin' house.
Hey, peep dis shit, kids...

http://www.maudevintage.com/castellane/digiki/hellodigiki/polypunk.html

Wookiez4Life!
DJBF

Friday, July 29, 2005

Derrida vs. ZIMA HUMMER 

Notes on meeting the SHOBOYS last night:



Email from O., would I like to meet in Shinjuku at the Alta bld. under the big screen (tickled that THIS is the first place he suggests for our meeting).

Of course I would! O. is one of my favorite hirsutes, so...

I spot Balula first. He has on killer glasses and is about to get hit by a tourist bus since he is in the street filming shinjuku traffic near the Kabukicho crossing.

Greetings.



I make it a point to use the word "bobo" about 100 times, so see if anybody catches on. Later on, and more drunk, I will orgasmically make a meta-ref. to a fictional character that I invent (with the help of semi-intoxicated SHOBOYS): DJ Bobofete(!). I repeat: DJ Bobofete. Later it will occur to me that DJ SHOBOfete might be nice as well, but I keep this to myself...

O. nervously explains why they are here and what they are doing. At this point I don't suspect in the slightest that this will have anything to do with Derrida or ZIMA.

They want to go to DONKI and on top of a building, they say. OK, I can do that.

DONKI. They go in looking for specific shit, somehow give up or change the plan, and wind up buying other shit. I stand around and look at the mint-flavor body lube display.

ON TOP OF A BUILDING? Sure...I happen to know a place. 7th floor, we go on top. Derrida is still nowhere to be seen. Back of the building overlooks the JR tracks (Yamanote, Chuo, etc.), front overlooks one of Shinjuku's main intersections/streets. Sun is setting. We are having 'taifu-ikka' and the weather is wonderful...a hot day, but a clear sky.


The ringleader, Minifer tries to overcome he fear of FALLING and climbs up on some really high shit.

VISIT JNR records http://www.neds-records.com/main.html
VISIT LOS ALPSON http://www.the-shinjuku.ne.jp/CONTENTS/IN/ENTER/RECORD/losapson.html

Walk to Shinokubo for drinks. Figure the guys are about to have one month's worth of Japanese food (mostly onigiri) and that will get old, so...find a back-alley izakaya that doesn't cater to Japanese, only Korean clientele...perfect, just what I was looking for. The late-40s Korean woman who is the host of the eatery doesn't really speak Japanese. I address her in broken Korean. She responds warmly, letting us in to drink and order some light food.

Trying to get 'ocha' Minifer instead is served 'corn-tea' (they don't have tea or water) we all try it. It is great. Must remember this drink.

A few beers.

Lots of silly conversation that only sounds good if you are the one having the conversation. If any of it were written down, we would all try to run and hide...unless it were made into a part of Kill Bill III.

21:32 The now infamous 'makkori'/'mokkori' non-incident takes place. (Check here for the tender perv's mis-construement of this, and my snappy reply.)



I spend a lot of time talking to DOMOTIC (I always wonder if he takes his name from the Paul Virilio usage of this term...). I like him a lot. He knows all about Star Wars and in-flight movies on SWISS AIR, and maintains strong, controversial opinions...despite the objections of his fellow SHOBOYS! What a rebel.

SPECIAL MESSAGE TO DOMOTIC: Please run out and watch the movie "Cool Hand Luke" right now! Please take note of the fight scene. (Domotic is the biggest SHOBOY, and so he is the ALPHA MALE. Since I am not small, Domotic and I have to have a duel...or a fight to the death...or so he tells me.)



I didn't get to talk to Balula much. I'll fix that next time. He went to art school(!)

Minifer is looking tired. We stop drinking and get our special Korean chewing gum from the woman. Good. Everything is as I had envisioned it would be...

We walk back to Shinjuku, taking some side streets.

The SHOBOYS make an aborted attempt to climb up to the roof of a buliding and scout out future concert space. They chicken out.

(The following conversation is translated from 'pidgin')
Domotic to me: "Should we go back? We kind of chickened out!"
Me: "Even if you go back now, you will still be a chicken."

We stand on the street corner after O. has a kind of ideological nervous-breakdown. (I always liked how shy and sensitive he is.) We get into a HOT 4-way conversation about...something.

Minifer makes a good point about the economics of noise.

I think this is where Derrida comes in, but i can't remember, because right about at the same time things started getting HOT, the ZIMA HUMMER drove by, playing booty-bass.

More pics here:
http://www.hummer.co.jp/news/050703_ZIMA/050703.html

Somewhere in the middle of the whole thing, all of my bourbon (I had brought my infamous FLASK with "R. DUCKWORTH" etched into the cap. This is the same flask from which super stars like HYPO, CARL STONE, RODDY SCHROCK, DIGIKI and countless others have drink/drank/drunk)...

Balula: (Apologetically) It is all gone...
Robert: It was made full to be emptied by you.

Shinjuku station, 11PM.

We say goodbye, but then I notice MASAGORO is playing on the street near the exit.

We stand and listen to her music. Very good. If she was signed to some label, she would already be a star!
We buy two of her CDs and are given 2 more for free.
She writes on a big sheet of paper with a pen: REALITY MONEY IS DIFFICULT!

WE CAN'T HELP BUT AGREE

SHOBOYS go home. They have to play with wires.

I ride my bike to Shibuya and have drinks with my dominatrix friend.

ROUND #1 goes to ZIMA. Can Derrida make a comeback?



Oh, I just realized that the title for this post could also be "Yellow Skin, Jar-Jar Mask" in honor of Fannon



...or at least, that's MY side of the story.

Here is the SHOBOYS side of it.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

Folie a trois (plus one) 


Going to meet these boys in a few hours for kicks.
http://shobus.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

laptop envy 

rod,

10 years ago, paul virilio wrote a brief essay called 'from sexual
perversion to sexual diversion' in which, during a discussion of
'cybersex' he writes the following:

"with 'biomechanical' extension on the one hand and 'energy' ablation
on the other, the individual of the techoscientific age loses the
capacity to experience himself as a centre of energy; he bocomes
useless and will eventually become totally superfluous when faced with
the automation of his productive and perceptual functions..."

and i think this can be applied tellingly to the 'failure' of laptop
music as a 'performative' art.

thoughts?
best,
r.

We three (four?) 

That Borges story where the guy is waiting for his killer.
The three kinds of death in ancient Japan.
Memento mori/vivere.
Manical laughter after the quake.
Hi, you've reached God. I can't come to the phone right now, but if you'll please leave your name...

Saturday, July 23, 2005

Earthquake 


Every person in Tokyo are squished to dead.
Every buildings is toppled to flat.
No crepes in Harajuku anymore to had.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Musical economy 

What The Residents do on this album

and what David does on his album

have something in common, actually.

This didn't suck. 

Some crazy girl from Uji peeped me this link. I'm sure you'll love it as much as I did.
http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/10119/

Monday, July 18, 2005

Playing the race card 

Can't you see that Japanese racism is not 'deep and profound'???


Oh, and in a related story...

Friday, July 15, 2005

Ethos 

Moronic cynicism is publishing notes towards a definition of "moronic cynicism".

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

IMA 


IMA, originally uploaded by glitchslaptko.


OFFICE 


OFFICE, originally uploaded by glitchslaptko.


C3Peeko 


Why, oh why didn't they get "Peeko-san" to do the voice of C3P0 in Star Wars films?

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

in the country of the blind, the one-eyed is king 

hummm...here's an interesting spin on this whole thing. st. nick is fond of brandishing his "bind man" parable, we all know the story, so i won't repeat it here. anyway, i'd just like to point out a chink in the intellectual armor.

here goes: while most of the "blind men" (marxy, myself, and a few thousand others out there) who are, in an effort to try and understand japan as deeply as possible, trying to use ALL of our various "intelligences"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

nick, on the other hand, has WILLINGLY discarded one of his "intelligences" (verbal-linguistic) and then in an effort to justify this, frequenty questions the "merits" of our "linguistic understandings" of japan.

the problem with this is, by focusing on the relative merits of his virtually senseless ("sans-sense") position, he implies that we AREN'T employing all of our other senses too! well, OF COURSE WE ARE! we are feeling, touching, tasting, smelling, etc. the "sensory" japan just as much as he is, if not more since we are here 24/7 and he is not.

of course, the next logical step for nick at this point, if he wan't to spend his time and energy to salvage this line of reasoning, is to concede my point, and then argue that he is simply more "intelligent" in the sensory areas that he has decided to focus on. this is a moot point, and i will not argue it here.

now if nick were somehow an idiot savant, and were INCAPABLE of speaking another language, or even his native one, then his position would be forgivable. even though his statements sometimes make me up this into question, i'm convinced he is in full possession of his mental faculties. therefore, no sympathy for him, and his whole intellectual edifice build around this parable as a kind of post-modern excuse is a complete sham.

imagine an astrophysicist who decided to throw away his "logical-mathematical intelligence" and decided to focus on exploring the chemical structure of stars with his "body-kinesthetic
intelligence"...or to put things another way: i'm sure IF stephen hawking were CAPABLE of doing just this, he would. sadly, he can't.

nick can no longer make use of this excuse, thank goodness.

now i'm off. bigger "pakura" to fry...

hi-five,
r.
http://glitchslaptko.blogspot.com/
-----------------------------
BONUS PHOTO!!!
THE KING WITH ONE EYE

PIRATE IN THE BUBBLE 


PIRATE IN THE BUBBLE, originally uploaded by glitchslaptko.


Monday, July 11, 2005

DungeonMaster Eno 


It's 2008. You are a musician in one of the new 'Neo-Science' bands, playing in an underground club in the Afro-Chinese ghetto in Osaka, not far from the university. The whole audience is high on 'Dreamwater', an auditory hallucinogen so powerful that it can be transmitted by sweat condensation alone. You are also feeling its effects, finding yourself fascinated by intricate single-note rhythm patterns, shard-like Rossetta-stone sonic hieroglyphs. You are in no particular key - making random bursts of data which you beam into the performance. You are lost in the abstracted rational beauty of a system no one else fully understands, sending out messages that can't be translated. You are a great artist, and the audience is expecting something intellectually challenging from you. As a kid, your favourite record (in your Dad's record collection) was Trout Mask Replica.

- Brian Eno from the "Roles and game-playing" section of "A Year with Swollen Appendices"

Bonus Role Playing Triva: The Eno pictured above is a perfect doppelganger for Elrond from the LOTR movies... downright scary!

Read 'em and weep 


In order to find some answers to my questions on international sovereignty, now pouring over:
01. Between Past and Future - Hannah Arendt
02. Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt

Stricto sensu 


"How does a terror that is organized, provoked, and instrumentalized differ from that fear that an entire tradition, from Hobbes to Schmitt and even to Benjamin, holds to be the very condition of the authority of law and of the sovereign exercise of power, the very condition of the political and of the state? In Leviathan Hobbes speaks not only of "fear" but of "terror." Benjamin speaks of how the state tends to appropriate for itself, and precisely through threat, a monopoly on violence ("Critique of Violence")."

"...This is yet one more reason not to consider everything that has to do with Islam or with the Arab Muslim "world" as a "world," or at least as one homogeneous whole. And wanting to take all these divisions, differences, and differends into account does not necessarily constitue an act of war; nor does trying to do everything possible to ensure that in this Arab Muslim "world," which is not a world and not a world that is ONE, certain currents do not take over, namely, those that lead to fanaticism, to an obscurantism armed to the teeth with modern techno-science, to the violation of every juridico-political principle, to the cruel disregard for human rights and democracy, to a nonrespect for life. We must help what is called Islam and what is called "Arab" to free themselves from such violent dogmatism. We must help those who are fighting heroically in this direction on the inside, whether we are talking about politics in the narrow sense of the term or else about an interpretation of the Koran. When I say that we must do this for what is called Islam and what is called "Arab," I obviously mean that we must not do any less when it comes to Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia!"

"...But should we then say that 9/11 was a "major event"? Even though the word "major" suggest height and size, the evaluation here cannot be merely quantitative, a question of the size of the towers, the territory attacked, or the number of victims. You know, of course, that one does not count the dead in the same way from one corner of the globe to the other. It is our duty to recall this, without it attenuating in the least our sadness for the victims..."

- Retrofitting Derrida's comments on 9/11

Sunday, July 10, 2005

The farce be with them 


Taken at Tsutaya in Roppongi yesterday.

Saturday, July 9, 2005

Hard times 

Yo, don't get me started about the anxiety of walking through Harajuku with my computer in my bag, dog!

Friday, July 8, 2005

Terrorbird 

When you say "9/11" ["7/7"] you are already citing, are you not? ...recalling, as if in quotation marks, a date or a dating that has taken over our public space and our private lives...Something fait date, I would say in a French idiom something marks a date, a date in history; that is always what's most striking, the very impact of what is at least felt, in an apparently immediate way, to be an event that truly marks, that truly makes its mark, a singular and..."unprecedented" event. I say "apparently immediate" becasue this "feeling" is actually less spontaneous than it appears: it is to a large extent conditioned, constituted, if not actually constructed, circulated at any rate through the media by means of a prodigious techo-socio-political machine. "To mark a date in history" presupposes, in any case, that "something" comes or happens for the first and last time, "something" that we do not yet really know how to identify, determine, recognize, or analyze but that should remain from here on in unforgettable: an ineffeceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are--and I want to insist on this at the outset--only suppositions and presupositions. Unrefined and dogmatic, or else carefully considered, organized, calculated, strategic--or all of these at once. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this "thing" that has just happened, this supposed "event."

- Derrida on terror

Tony Blair: "We will hold true to the British way of life."
Robert: What is the British way of life?

Tony Blair: "...our values will long outlast theirs."
Robert: Does the ability to sustain values over time define their worth?

Tony Blair: "The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize people, and we will not be terrorized."
Robert: This is not a matter of your state of mind. You have ALREADY been terrorized. The question is at this point, will you allow yourself to be victimized?

Tony Blair: "It is through terrorism that the people that have committed this terrible act express their values..."
Robert: What about British and American state terrorism? What "values" are expressed in that case?

George Bush: "One the one hand, we've got people here who are working to alleviate poverty and to help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS and that are working on ways to have a clean environment, and on the other hand, you've got people killing innocent people."
Robert: If that is the case, it looks like America has its hands full.

- Robert in imaginary dialogue with the leaders of England and America

MERZBOOTY 


MERZBOOTY, originally uploaded by glitchslaptko.


GULAG DIDDY 


GULAG DIDDY, originally uploaded by glitchslaptko.


Not like this... 


Another quick note to Nick (a.k.a. Momus) on being a guest, WHEREVER he may find himself being a guest 

In The Apology of Socrates (17d), at the very beginning of his defense, Socrates addresses his fellow citizens and Athenian judges. He defends himself against the accustation of being a kind of sophist or skillful speaker. He announces that he is going to say what is right and true, certainly, against the liars who are accusing him, but without rhetorical elegance, without flowery use of language. He declares that he is "foreign" to the language of the courts, to the tribune of the tribunals: he doesn't know how to speak this courtroom language, this legal rhetoric of accusation, defense, and pleading; he doesn't have the skill, he is like a foreigner. (Among the serious problems we are dealing with here is that of the foreigner who, inept at speaking the language, always risks being without defense before the law of the country that welcomes or expels him; the foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated, the right to asylum, its limits, norms, policing, etc. He has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc. This persongage imposes on him translation into their own language, and that's the first act of violence. That is where the question of hospitality begins: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country? If he was already speaking our language, with all that that implies, if we already shared everything that is shared with a language, would the foreigner still be a foreigner and could we speak of asylum or hospitality in regard to him? This is the paradox that we are going to see become clearer.)

- Derrida, Of Hospitality

Piana: My new hero 


http://www11.plala.or.jp/piana/

Thursday, July 7, 2005

this looks hot 

http://www.mobium.org/

V. DIDDY 


V. DIDDY, originally uploaded by glitchslaptko.


D. RADICAL 


D. RADICAL, originally uploaded by glitchslaptko.


Tuesday, July 5, 2005

DAIKONYAMA RADICAL 


DAIKONYAMA RADICAL, originally uploaded by glitchslaptko.


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