MY LIFE IS ABOUT TO CHANGE

IN SUMMARY:
Things are going to be different now

WHAT

So I got an email from my ex-girlfriend and she has a new last name because she got married..?
I'm not sure why but this makes me want to go out into the street and start punching myself and others.

Addendum:

I was immediately hit with this

"I own a little city
Awful pretty
Can’t help people
Can hurt them though
Shoot their dogs
Mess ‘em up
Be imaginative
Plant trees
Best to leave ‘em alone?
Who decides?
Sam’s wife is Sam’s wife and coveting is not nice."
Which is from Donald Barthelme's short story "I bought a little city".
The last time I read that story (September?), when I read these lines I thought about my ex, and a time when I was waiting for her in Ikebukuro station, by the smoking section, reading the above lines. Strange how things get tied in like that. The circuit of my being is flooded with nostalgia.

Eh.

I broke up with her anyway.

MY UMBRELLAS (SAID TO THE RHYTHM OF "MY ADIDAS")

Current status: Listening to DJ Jimi "Sumt' In Missing"

I'm not sure if I have blogged™ about this yet:
I made 3 umbrella designs for AND A Tokyo. Apparently they are selling well.
The pink one seems to be selling well, so they tell me, which is kind of disappointing because it is the design I like the least. But to quote the bard: "girls buy pink things, crackhead buy crack/And a white man get paid off of all of that."
Seriously, when I was making the rough designs the editor said "Could you make this design a little more girl-friendly?"
And I said "How should I do that?"
And she said "I don't know, add pictures of cake or something?"
So I added some jewels and flowers and called it a day.

Also a general hello to everyone.
this is a blog™ so I should tell everyone how I am doing:
STATUS: Stomach Flu(?)
I'm going to be self-indulgent and self-important enough on the internet to tell you all about this: I have a fever, but not only that...
Diarrhea. My Diarrhea. It's painful and I keep doing it, like I can't stop.
Also the only thing in the bathroom is this:
I keep forgetting to bring a different book so I have been sitting on the toilet reading comic versions of chinese horror stories. Some highlights? Man gets lost in the mountains and joins a tribe of hairy people who live in giant nests in trees and becomes one of them after accidentally have sex with a female, later the hairy people form into a giant yeti to fight of invaders. Chinese sorceror fights aborted fetus haunting a horse's stomach. Rich old woman puts head inside an earthenware pot to become young with hilarious accursed results. I'm not sure whether it is the just the fever or this comic which is destroying my mind. Also there is a scene where a child enchants a table to become a pegasus and flies around on it, accompanied by a captured convict depicted as a bearded man's head sticking out of a jug. What the fuck.

So in closing,
Buy my umbrellas (sorry actually I don't think they sell outside of Japan)
Read my blog™ for more details on what is coming out of me.

Also comment on my blog. The only person who does is N. Jewelick.

R. KELLY AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ANCIENT LIBRARY

So this is old news, but I read this some time ago and it cracked me up:

"To date, neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which
tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit
an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Mr. Cameron
or Fox.

But a number of enthusiasts who have been swapping notes on the
message boards at IMDB.com claim to have already seen the movie -- in
their dreams. "The special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons,
but they looked 3-D still," wrote one "planetshane," whose particular
dream involved a pirated copy of an early version.

"It was the best movie I had ever seen," the post continued."

:
via The New York Times, full article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/movies/25avatar.html?_r=2

So this is about some enthusiastic fans discussing a movie they have not seen, pushed to a level of obsession at which they are seeing the movie, and describing this dream to other obsessives on the Internet.

I thought about this today because I was thinking about a similar incident I witnessed.
I was attending a certain liberal arts college (to protect the innocent let's call it "Bard College") and was attending a lecture given by a certain famous American poet (who we will be calling "R. Kelly" after "The World's Greatest").
I don't remember what the theme of the lecture was, or why I was there, but it wasn't a class and was held in a large auditorium. Perhaps there were other lecturers. Perhaps I was there to impress a girl or to have something to talk to a girl about afterward. I don't remember.
Anyway, at some point R. Kelly got behind the lectern and started giving some kind of speech.

In the speech he was describing a dream he had, in which he had witnessed the burning of the Ancient Library of Alexandria. (The largest library of the ancient world, purportedly burned by Julius Caesar, though this is contested)
R. Kelly gave a rousing speech in which he described the horrified feeling of watching those ancient texts vanish, never to be read again, disappearing into the fire and falling columns.
I looked around the auditorium and saw that everyone was transfixed. R. Kelly described waking up in tears, thinking of how close he was to all of those lost texts, and the tragedy that he witnessed was beyond his description.
It was absolute maudlin bullshit. But I looked around and everyone seemed to be totally taken in by it. There were almost audible sighs, and people wiping tears away from their eyes. Maybe I am exaggerating.
But I had the overwhelming feeling that R. Kelly was lying. That he had indeed not actually had this dream, but had made it up.
I don't know if I was justified in this feeling.
Maybe it was because at the time I felt entirely opposed to the pretentiousness and ridiculous solipsism of academia at "Bard College". I was annoyed that I had been locked out of two majors. I was pretty pissed that I was expected to have an opinion about Jacques Derrida. (I was nineteen years old.)
I also hated R. Kelly despite not knowing his work. (I still haven't read anything by him)
Regardless, I felt deeply, as if by some kind of instinct, that R. Kelly was lying. He never had a dream about the destruction of the library in a dream, and he was lying about it.
And I think I know why I felt that way when I think about it now.

R. Kelly was attaching himself, via the semi-supernatural act of dreaming, to a historical event (which, by the way, might be apocryphal, because some archaeologists contest that there is one single event which destroyed the library, nor is it in Roman records)

Then again, maybe R. Kelly was not lying about the dream. Maybe Planetshane really did get a sneak preview in his mind.

I once watched five episodes of the Sopranos in a row and had a dream which vaguely had something to do with the Sopranos. I remember having a dream about The Legend of Zelda as a kid.

Nah, fuck it, I still feel like he was lying. Not only was the content of the dream too pretentious to be true, his maudlin delivery was totally suspect.

CURRENT SITUATION

Just got over a stomach flu. Had to be treated at the local police hospital because nowhere else was open on Saturday.

Found myself staring across the room at my cell phone to see whether the light was blinking or not.

Ex-girlfriend is getting married.

Most recent girlfriend dumped me because she secretly had a fiancee in Korea.

Went to the studio but didn't work, just looked at videos on the internet of Vogue dancing from the early '80s.

Cut myself shaving.

Listened to Fred Lane.

Hung out with some friends who are trying to organize a fruit catering business. One of the people there who was complaining about how broke he is later drove away in an olive green Mercedes and we all talked shit about him.

Was handed a bag of navel oranges.

Listened to the Buzzcocks.

Talked to a friend of mine who would rather stay home and watch hours of movies alone than hang out.

Listened to a radio show about animals going extinct.

Talked to my father on the phone about Sodom and Gomorrah, and how Lot sent his daughters out to be raped, and later after the city was destroyed, Lot's daughters got him drunk and took turns fucking him in a cave.

Just found out a musician I hate is almost 50 and that made me feel better.

Blogged the fuck out of it.

ALIEN VS PREDATOR

"Alien vs Predator" explains what happened to me last night.
A perfect metaphor. I was the alien.
They won't be displaying this skull in Osaka.

CONSPIRACY THEORY EPISODE 5

I got an unwelcome email from my ex-girlfriend on our 3 year anniversary saying that we could never be friends, and that she has a boyfriend now, and that they are getting married.
I received this mail while getting a haircut from my friend Tsukiyama, at his store, and he was describing the plot to Lars Von Trier's "Dogville" to me.

I went home and read up on Lars Von Trier and came across this sentence on wikipedia: "His parents considered themselves both communists and committed nudists". I suddenly wanted to get back together with my ex. I told a female friend about this and she said that my ex had sent me that message on purpose to either fuck with me or make me jealous.

Also I figure if you call yourself a "nudist" you have to be pretty committed. Are there levels of demarcation? Do committed nudists not wear shoes? Socks? If you walk around naked to the waist are you a noncommittal nudist?

Later in the week I slept with a girl, and it was late and there were no trains home, so I invited her back to my place, which was an hour walk or so away. She said "I'm not that kind of girl". I'm not joking about this. I think I offended her because I thought she was joking, and laughed very hard. I think I am really interested in her because of this incident.

I asked a friend who knows her why this happened, and his response is that this happened because this girl is Korean and they have a strange and strict culture.

I went home and tried to watch Dogville online through some pirate sites. I found it with Chinese subtitles, but it would stop loading after the first fifteen minutes. What is more off-putting than the minimalism of the set design, is fake americanisms spoken by obvious Europeans. Like the narrator, John Hurt, saying "U S of A".

I read a little about Dogville on the internet and they compared the staging of the film to Brecht's theory. I was thinking about Brecht recently, and I am of the opinion that other than "Threepenny Opera" and "Mother Courage", I really don't care for him or his pedantic theory.

One thing I respect about Brecht is his performance when he was called before the House Un-American Committe. Brecht was a committed communist, but at that time he was, for whatever reason, getting screenwriting credits in Hollywood. When they called him up to testify he pretended to not speak English. When they got a German interpreter he spoke only in gibberish. When someone spoke up and said he had to speak English if he was a Hollywood screenwriter, he started speaking English. When they broke for lunch he got on a plane to Switzerland and never went back to the US of A.

An old Professor of mine told me a story about seeing Brecht's "The Good Woman of Szechuan" staged in China, wherein the plot and all of the dialogue had been completely re-written to be totally different from the original play. My Professor was Chinese, and a visiting professor of European literature. After the play he was supposed to give a lecture on "The Good Woman of Szechuan". He panicked while watching the play because his prepared lecture was on a topic that wasn't even addressed in this revised play he was watching. He forced himself to vomit so he could plead sickness and get out of the lecture.

Next week is "Golden Week", a series of holidays, all in a row. My ex is going to Switzerland to stay with a guy she met some months ago. I don't know if this is the guy she plans to marry or not but wouldn't give her the satisfaction of asking. Also I feel foolish caring about any of this considering I broke up with her.

All afternoon I have been working on helping a friend with a translation of a television show about "tearjerkers", emotional songs and the stories that led to their creation. The first song is by a ventriloquist who was bullied as a child and contemplated suicide, but who through the model of his favorite TV actor became a positive person. The second one is by a woman who was a popular singer in the seventies, who fell madly in love with a socialist activist who was imprisoned for his activities. He proposed to her while she was visiting him in jail. Later they had three children, but fought about whether to live in the countryside or the city. He suddenly died one day some decades later, and she found she could no longer write music. Then she planted a lemon tree and watched it grow. It reminded her of him so she wrote a song about it.

It has been raining all day. Maybe the rainy season has started. I have been listening to Missisippi John Hurt's "goodnight Irene" on repeat.