Ethereal Rinko Kawauchi

I spent my Thanksgiving turkey-gorging in the Park Slope home of a couple who own a lot of art books. My favorite find: Aila (2004), by the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi. Her pictures are really stunning. They feel contemporary, but also succeed in capturing much of Japan’s traditional aesthetic themes like serenity and ephemerality.

The following are all untitled, from the “Aila” series, 2003-2004. I stole them from the internet.

Advanced capitalism

From Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami:

I enjoy shopping at [the fancy-schmancy Kinokuniya supermarket]. You may not believe this, but the lettuce you buy there lasts longer than lettuce anywhere else. Don’t ask me why. Maybe they round up the lettuce after they close for the day and give them special training. It wouldn’t surprise me. This is advanced capitalism, after all.

Nearly everyone I know who has read Murakami dislikes his books because they don’t like the narrators, who are—i guess—”unlikeable.” Murakami’s narrators represent the postmodern everyman: Detached, deadpan, resigned.. annoying, because his apathetic attitude means that you don’t love him or hate him enough to find him interesting. Remind you of anyone?

Dance Dance Dance is only the third Murakami novel I’ve read (the others being A Wild Sheep Chase and Norwegian Wood). Verdict: this is not escapist literature. The narrators are unlikeable probably because they remind us of ourselves, and that’s the point, isn’t it? Surrealism isn’t the same as magical realism, and Murakami is actually a master of the latter. When you adjust expectations, the narrators’ introspection becomes eerily relatable. The perfect windows into their worlds, which can be just as bizarre as our own realities. Very Nick Carraway-esque; I’m sane and everyone around me is crazy. Or is it that I’m crazy and everyone else is sane?

Some vector animals

I’ve been wasting a lot of time this week trying to learn Adobe Illustrator. Here’s a cat and a fish:

Accepting dull existence

From A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers:

I pull up to a light, next to a bunch of young black kids. Maybe they’ll shoot me. I’m in the zone of all probability. I cannot be surprised. Earthquakes, locusts, poison rain would not impress me. Visits from God, unicorns, bat-people with torches and scepters–it’s all plausible. If these kids happen to be bad kids, and have guns, and want to shoot people like me, it will be me, the glass will break and the bullet will come through and I will not be surprised. With the bullet in my head, I will drive my car into a tree, and as I am waiting to be pulled from the wreck, nearly dead, I will not panic or yell. I will think only: Weird, this is exactly what I expected.

Performance plugging

Hi, shameless plug. My very cool and small friend Alexa played her first show a couple of nights ago and it tugged heartstrings and lifted spirits and blew minds. Her backing band consisted of several more friends, one of whom demanded that I post this video (in which for some reason he is dead-center and bathed in spotlight).

There is a full house of devoted fans behind this camera, by the way. When Alexa is sitting atop the acoustic scene hierarchy in the near future… Well. You heard it here first.

On connoisseurship in general

From Joel Stein’s Awesome Column on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries in the November 16, 2009 issue of TIME Magazine:

Legitimizing pot hasn’t created more users; it has just produced more annoying ones, who now apply Whole Foods-ian levels of snobbiness to the differences between Hawaiian Sativa and Humboldt Indica.

Out of the 70s, into the 80s

i love synths. Watch the entirety of BBC’s recent documentary “Synth Britannia” covering the glory of synths in the U.K. and the groups that pioneered the sound (for eventual abuse and sometimes advancement by New York City hipsters).

For an abridged version, here is a video of three guys performing an 80s synth hits medley:

Memory Tapes

Memory Tapes is the lovechild of NJ producer Dayve Hawk‘s two solo projects: Weird Tapes and Memory Cassette. (Can we expect future releases under “Weird Cassette” to round out this quadfecta of aliases?)

The first three tracks on the new album, Seek Magic, are absolute money. Give “Green Knight” a listen–yes, that is indeed a basketball game sample about a minute in.

Protect ya neck

A new discovery: Swedish music label Sincerely Yours (home to Air France, Tough Alliance, etc.) sells–in addition to records and “normal” band merchandise–bulletproof vests. Unfortunately it’s no longer for sale. Seems to have sold out as an April 2007 limited edition. Too bad, it sounds like a must-have.

protect ya neck with 50% symbolism and 50% reality. it ain’t safe no more.

this quilted bulletproof vest is perfect for traditional hunting as well as urban guerilla warfare. there’s always someone who wants to put an end to you if you kill compromises like others kill flies. if this someone aims sharp enough, at least you’ll take your last breath with sueded shoulders.

Holley portraits

I found this guy’s site while searching “christmas card” in Google Images. I kept clicking and stumbled upon a typographic self portrait project comprising user-created submissions. The resulting gallery is pretty cool. Holley Portraits via Daniel Eatock.

Kundera and the new media landscape

From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera:

[B]eauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise–the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music–we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

It’s like he saw it coming, way back in 1979, PRE-BLOGOSPHERE. Gives more weight to that “unbearable lightness of being” he wrote about five years later doesn’t it?