Notes From Me

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

I Don't Hate Chaka Any More

When me and my brother were kids we liked to watch Land of the Lost. I was into it for the time travel aspect mostly, though the sleestacks were morbidly interesting and any episode that had a matrix in it was pretty great.The two kids and their dad were all right, though it was odd that Holly's pants always looked new. The theme song had all kinds of banjo going on, and made no bones about the unrealistic thousand-foot drop that the family survived (time travel saves lives I guess).

But then there was Chaka. He was a...pre-human maybe, a boy-sized one. He was whiny and misguided and had no upper lip. I will save all attempts at description and just show you. He looked like this:

Example

Holy shit.

I think he could have been a precursor to Ch ewb aka or maybe that's who he grew up into, having figured out the time and space travel stuff. It might be that I don't hate him anymore because I don't have to hear him or see him in action. Nah, there isn't enough reason to hate any made up character, really.

posted by lux at 6:40 PM
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Sunday, November 28, 2004

Dolphins, whales, profits

Someone I know had a belated Halloween party that turned out to be more of a Christmas masquerade. There, we met a visitor, of which this area only has by way of we four teachers, aikido people, "snack girls" from Russia and the Phillipines, and the occasional tourist. This guy was from Vancouver, and he was a wildlife preservationist who later told me and a few friends what his activist mission was. I was fairly impressed because as far as activism goes, it seems that you could spend your whole life doing risky stuff and only make a tiny difference (not that this isn't noble, just that it seems one must choose one's actions carefully; if you take it to extremes, you could get thrown in jail and have your plan fail...). Anyway,
There is a town near hear called Taiji that has a dolphin "resort" where customers can swim with dolphins, who have been captured from the wild and made into performance-slaves. The dolphins are herded by 13 boats, run by 26 men who are the only men in all this area allowed to kill dolphins. When they spot a migrating pod of dolphins coming, they drop cables with speakers attached and blast a wall of sound, driving the dolphins into the Taiji bay, and drop nets to prevent escape.
A few of the dolphins are kept for training purporses, and the rest are slaughtered pretty brutally, turning the whole bay red, and then they are sold for food (which is dangerous to eat due to high mercury levels). The dolphin trade yields about a million dollars a month.
Not long ago, a group called Sea Shepherd came to Taiji after a dolphin capture and unfastened the nets in the bay, but the dolphins just went over, looked out to sea, and went back into the bay, perhaps because they were nervous about more sound blasts. The two activists were jailed and all the dolphins killed. So, this guy we met has a different plan; I don't want to give him away but it involves a method of scaring the dolphins away from the boats, and if it works, he will pass the method on to groups who have the resources to carry it out. He is also trying to start up whale watching as a business here in order to dissuade whale slaughter. I think since the Japanese have been hunting whales as food for thousands of years, not hunting them for sport, it should be up to them to continue it or not, but the Japanese who send huge ships to northern seas to kill humpbacks and blue whales are not doing anything okay.
Different subject- my good friend Masami, when I told him I had seen a monkey, said, "You are the child of the yellow monkey exterminators," which I didn't get for a moment but then realized he meant WWII soldiers. Then he added, "They had permits, Cindy." It was his usual style of odd humor that I like, but the word exterminators hints at the mentality of much of warmongering; that the people beind killed aren't really people. I don't even like to kill ants. Sometimes a mosquito.

posted by lux at 7:52 PM
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Monday, November 22, 2004

Beautiful Monkey!

On the way to Nara yesterday, Japan's original capital city, I saw a pretty good sized monkey who was sitting on the side of the road, on the top of a riverbank. I've heard about wild monkeys here but hadn't seen one till then. She (I think it was a she) was very fluffy silver gray and far better looking than I thought a monkey would be for some reason. So when I think that Bush Jr. looks like a monkey maybe I mean he looks like a badly drawn cartoon.
I've been here nine months but I didn't learn until yesterday the word for photo: its shashing! A great word.
A thought about words. It's a common current popular idea to say that since words are an abstraction, using them encourages stupidity because when we hear a word we can only either associate its sound with the sequence of letters of the word, or we can come up with images/sounds/associations from our life's experience that will represent that word. I'm thinking that, since I am alive and therefore not in stasis, I continually come up with new things to associate with the words I see and hear, which isn't limiting and doesn't hinder my creativity. If someone says "monkey" and I imagine a long-nosed, colorful monkey playing a xylaphone, it won't detract from the speaker's intentions but rather open a way for more sharing of ideas, plus we can always incorporate gesture to further understanding, which isn't to say that words ever, ever tell what the wordless, pre-word idea was, but at least something akin to it can be pointed toward and something beyond it can be described.

posted by lux at 4:12 AM
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Monday, November 15, 2004

Buddhism Christmas

Last Saturday I went with friends up, over, through and up more mountains for three hours until we reached the place where esoteric Buddhism began. There in a Redwood forest is an immense Buddhist cemetary with about five hundred thousand various kinds of tombs (from the regular, Japanese rectangular gravemarker to intricate statues to monuments of gigantic proportions fronted by massive tori gates) all crowded amid the great trunks and thick ferns. Photos aren't allowed. The dank green air is accentuated by overhanging moss on the ancient stone structures. Many of the protector-deity statues have freshly crocheted caps in red or green or orange. Approaching one of the temples, we were greeted by huge wafts of incense smoke drifting out and making visible the occasional sunshafts.
The place was first honored about twelve hundred years ago by a priest. There is also for some reason a place to ski far above the cemetary. Although all humans have a common ancestor, I still don't really know what it is like to live in the country where "my" ancestors lived. It is probably usual that people in my situation tend to deemphasize propriety of ancestry in favor of something along the lines of, "We are all related."
On the way back we stopped at one of the oldest hot springs in Japan and relaxedly mineralized our skin under the night sky.
It's mid-November and here the Christmas symbols are coming out. Of course, there is no Thanksgiving. People can be seen wearing Santa hats, and on the way to work this morning on my bike I saw a woman in an above-the-knee black skirt, garter-type opaque red stocking that attached under her hemline but above her calf-height black boots, and a faux-fur, short flared cloak with a white leopard pattern. It basically looked like, sexy winter Christmas yeah!
happy thanksgiving.

posted by lux at 9:17 PM
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Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Stolen Artifact Found By Tree

Miners Refuse to Work after Death, Actor Sent to Jail for Not Finishing Sentence, Bush "Wins," More Lies Ahead. Only now, he is open about lying because his voters can't be bothered with the truth.
I was looking into volunteering in the various countries I'll be traveling through, and found that it costs hundreds, and sometimes thousands of dollars to do volunteer work. I never thought it was possible to be too poor to volunteer. But, there are possibilites of exchanging a day's work for a days' food and board. That' s more like it.
In Japan, you can't directly vote for the Prime Minister. You have to vote for representatives of parties, who then get to choose someone for the position, and that person can stay in office for an indeterminate length of time as long as the chosen person's party has the majority of representatives. Are you not so glad it doesn't work like that in the States (if you live there)?

posted by lux at 8:13 PM
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Monday, November 08, 2004

Notes From Me

I've been wondering if the degree of difficulty of any undertaking is in proportion to what you learn from it. My singing teacher (who is teaching me far more than honing my voice) keeps reminding me that when you cause by allowing, what you are doing happens easily. Then, I find, the analogies of my happenstance flow riverlike with my actions.
What I'm focusing on: resuming my learning of the guitar, now that I have one, and my learning of juggling, and I'm working on a painting, and planning a trip from Japan (where I have been living for almost nine months) around the lands of the earth, making my way by boat, bus, train and foot back to the states. So, if anyone will be passing through China, Thailand, Nepal, India, or Africa during March and April, or if you know of anything great in those places, let me know. And then in late April to May: Spain, France, Germany, Holland, England and Ireland. So far I'm seeing that people are far more similar than different. Is that an obviousity?

Where I live there are almost no books in English, so I read what friends give me or what I can find. Recently it's been Ursula K. LeGuin and will now be William Faulkner, Light in August.

Have you noticed while browsing blogs any themes that happen during that day's browsing? I had a God and Virginia one, and an all music, all the time one, and an America Is Like Rome/Lost Symbols of My Childhood. An amusing detail: Joe has a chart of the states listed by average IQ (a generally untrustable test but somewhat interesting to note) in descending order, and with it, which states Kerry won in and which Bush did. If this chart is correct, Kerry won in literally all the states with the highest average IQ. It would be funnier if Bush had lost.

posted by lux at 8:45 PM
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Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Mountain Ocean Sun Burger and Music, Music, Poetry

If you call in an order to MOS Burger, when you arrive they will give you a small packet containing a coin for the amount of the phone call.

Finally my guitar and I have found each other. A lefty, Morris, acoustic that will travel around the world with me in spring.

A little Auden for the people:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

posted by lux at 5:03 PM
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