Beautiful textures in the sky, ne?

This day was possibly the coolest I've experienced in Japan. A breeze blew from the North, the sky was limited by a blanket of thick high cloud. It had rained over night. Everything was clean, but grey.

It was also a Sunday, and a public holiday, the city was strangely deserted save the main thoroughfares that were uncharacteristically awash with local tourists. Photographs of faces against the decaying tiled edifices of the eighties.

A massive construction site was temporarily on hold, caught in the act; the building with its pants down.

The worn out Shinsaibashi where my workmate tells me she famously played- every night a disco in the heady eighties. Money, money, money…but no more. There is an intriguing aura of decay- the hauntings of past riches.

One use of the river is as a dumping ground for bicycles. Which one day get dredged up to make a giant Pollock like scramble- a sculpture on a barge.

The patterns in the paving are saying something to the raw and rustic fabrics of the players. Being watched, and I was watching too. A performance, a play? Organised dress ups? I like to imagine that it’s a regular Sunday event. Come to the park and lets play dress ups. Excellent appropriation of space.

Osaka through the glass

The reflection is on the opposite side of the road to my sometimes workplace. A tiny flourescently lit white space in the corner of a retail mega-structure. Between the cell phones and chocolate giftpacks, the plastic buckets from china and the cheap nylon shirts you can also buy English.

The apartments must be on my side of the road. The block is surrounded by the shopping centre beneath- easy access. The machine for living is decorated by the bright colours of the everyday. I like the trees, which are also in a straight line, grid like and have grown to a uniform height.

I'm sitting in a cafe overlooking Kyoto. The river is like a strip of somewhere else in this otherwise extended concrete slab. That halts abruptly at the mountains. Almost a mountain stream, the speed of water is of a refreshing alpine pace to that of the downstream Osakan Dotonbori. By then a sluggish, dirty, almost black beast with a slick, oily surface. Sitting in such high places is not conducive to the relaxation expected of green tea in a cafe. Somehow the eagle's perch put me on guard-I'm too exposed.

Even in a land that's mostly mountains yet is home to more than 120 million humans, there's still some empty space...

Every afternoon, like clockwork, it comes alive with the hollow wooden sounds of croquet, bicylces and bright yellow shirts.

Zen lines

Sandals (plastic) for monks

The sound of eternity has been playing for almost 1649 days.

A one thousand year long piece of music streaming into your living room...

http://longplayer.org/index.html

It goes in a circle and after a thousand years will come back to its beginning.

Wired in Wairoa really is worth checking out. Who is doing this??

Reminiscing the small town...

www.wairoa.com

I'm struck by the temple's symmetry and straight lines.

Is this a futile attempt to refer to some kind of "order"? Order as a transcendent process that these holy places attempt to evoke, realise within individual selves. Somehow such an ordering seems to have become associated, connected to the straight line, to the right-angle and perfect symmetry.

The temple displays its sacredness in its reflection of a greater cosmic order. Yet its attempted image of order seems a futile representation. The symmetrical paths are broken by zig-zaging cracks in the tarmak, the irregular growth of trees, the "random" location of pigeons on the ground. Tree roots emerge from the ground in infinitely complex patterns; oblivious to the right-angles and square tiles that impose a grid over the surface.

The symmetry and lines appear as a meek and futile human ordering that attempts to refer to a much more complex, an unknown and mysterious order. An order that is perhaps that which we see as chaos. Note the order and systematic regulation of the forest, or the order inherent in the "chaotic" patterns of the clouds. It is here that we see a clearer image of order, but one that is so complex we can never quite grasp its workings.

Always a pleasant way to spend the day in Kyoto...or anywhere:

"ONE OF THE BASIC situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

"In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones".

Theory of the Dérive
Guy Debord
Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956)
reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)
Translated by Ken Knabb

for more Situaltionalist writing see: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html

Unfortunately the sweet shop was out of azuki bean sweet, soft balls- wagashi. But the second-hand book store made up for it with a copy ofthe "complete" History of Islamic Political Thought. Oishi, ne?