Shinjuku Thief

You Were Born. So now you're free.

1. You Were Born. So Now You're Free.

Just the other day, I was able to enjoy a most unusual dessert. It became quickly apparent to me that this was no ordinary dessert - it had been prepared with great care and creativity. Unorthodox elements - yuzu and rosemary and sasparilla and tamarillo - had combined, in the hands of an exquisite craftsman, or craftswoman, to form this dessert. I inspected it closely, taking note of its' shape and specific gravity, hoping to discern the manner in which these elements combined to generate the unique attributes of this specific food item. The key to unlocking its' magical secrets was apple, a modest little chunk, very carefully sculpted into a geometric shape and mildly flavored with cinnamon; soon thereafter I was able to discern and identify each of the varied components that united in forming this delectable aggregate. Mesmerized, approriately, I left the house, so that I could purchase a second specimen, in order to study its' nature in an isolated, scientific fashion.

Later, my friend - who is something of an accomplished situationist - came over, and he unexpectedly consumed the second specimen as we listened to Henry Cow's Bittern Storm Over Ulm. He confessed that he's becoming frustrated with a project - he's unskilled at the art of delegation, and the varied underlings charged with combing through academic periodicals in search of strands he can weave into gold are instead devoting unfortunate amounts of time to sexually provocative websites. I informed him that the entire enterprise carried with it a seamy undertone of colonialism, reconfigured into a more professionally pleasing presentation. He snorted the expected disapprovals, and then a short time later, it began to rain, very heavily - an epic-scale deluge accompanied by lightning and small hailstones; a severe thunderstorm warning had been broadcast over NPR (on in an adjacent room), introduced by a strange, screeching tone, followed by a mechanized voice that had been treated with a reverb effect to accentuate its' metamorphic quality. Our conversation gradually turned in the direction of politics.

(photo by Takuya Miyamoto)

2. The Fecundity Of Life

The skyline has been thoroughly, effectively retrofitted, a sleek revision, with elements of travertine and chrome. The greatest manifestation of a town transformed - once, I would never be able to procure such finely crafted dessert, but today, we are so much more! We have grown, we have prospered, and life's rich pageant is a buffet, stretched towards infinity. We have our humble roots as provincials - meat, potatoes, soul food, misbegotten crustaceans yanked from nearby estuaries and boiled alive, with blended spices. But times have changed. People and places - nondescript no more.

Undesirables have been dispersed, nevermore to befoul the glass-smooth and buzzing boulevards, cast instead towards the ranchy suburbs, leafy lanes once the stuff of reassuring prime-time dramas, but now a millennial recasting introduces a more newsworthy quality: mall declines, seedy strips, grown-ups working fast-food, dented siding, a Camaro on blocks used as a closet annex, a lowering aura of shadiness. This atomization of the police blotter all-stars is but one face of a great civic project, shrouded in the celebratory. A new day is indeed dawning. Your ticket up is your ticket out.

As evolving provincials are wont to do, there is the usual shopping: the basket is filling swiftly, elements are on sale, alkali metals that spark to life after detuned soundchecks, noble gases whose integrity remains shaded behind the oaks of a campus green; elements lifted from the continent, and from the subcontinent, and from the dark continent. There's a great proliferation of boutiques, Provence à Piedmont - here the soundtrack is Pavement, there the soundtrack is Debussy; for every scene, there is a score. And as is true in every go-for-the-Oscar moment, that perfect, big score - configured with great precision - must never, ever startle or surprise.

Thus, my findings - as of yet - are inconclusive.

3. St. Cajetan

Let me tell you about the place I live. First, a room: the blinds are ancient, very old, rescued from a garbage pile somewhere. Ditto the carpet, a cheap apartment plush built in to the place, over the standard plywood sub-flooring. An oriental rug (an anachronistic term that somehow persists), a hand-me-down. Empty spaces - the former home of things sloughed off, victims of pressing needs to attend to the power bill, the water bill, or the general built-in costs that accompany living, walking around and breathing. Life is good.

And it truly is - there is the philosophy: less is more. Slough off the excess, the ephemera, the crap and clutter. To a profound degree, it is a philosophy of those who have something to give up in the first - you must be able to afford to let go. So here's what life has become - cavernous, the great chamber of emptiness. Taste is something I can no longer afford, after relinquishing a DVD collection (Italian, Japanese, Taiwanese, French, Mexican - a global tour of the great cinema that - in theory - remains a great passion; one would be hard pressed to find battered and beat copies of many of them in the local video shop, and I'm a few hundred miles off the retro-and-festival circut), and a CD collection (peaking at a genre-hopping several hundred, before collapsing back down to the five or ten no used shop would accept), I am left with books, unsellable as no one reads. Someone else out there, some entrepid shopper has the good fortune of lucking up on those obscure Bengali and Japanese DVDs that never found release in the United States. We've all worked for it, the right to consume, we've all put in our 40 hours, we all have earned the right. But the sand shifts beneath your feet, and what was mine is now yours forever. I have bare walls, dingy carpet, a 3-room apartment a block up the street from a whorehouse, and a rotting Toyota I can't afford to fix. Life is good.

On the daily hike to the bus stop - gotta get to work somehow - I took note of an interesting trend I've noticed before. At 6 A.M., it's especially pronounced. This would be the tendency of the local homeless population to spontaneously burst into splintered, fractured song. It's an impressive spectacle - impromptu performances of Rick James and Sly Stone (what message is being sent here), jazzed improvisationally with liberal doses of profanity and - from the one gentleman a block from the co-op grocery - non-specific threats of uninvited anal sex and breast abuse. Commuters, to work far more prestigious than I've managed to luck into (the use of one's mind and knowledge while working: what a novel, exotic concept!) whiz by, a blur of taillights streaking through the shifting chiaroscuro pastel dawn. The sound of strange, weird song echoes off the walls of non-descript nearby buildings. Perhaps it's folk music.

Days are rough things. Each one a struggle, a serious battle to not drown in the tide, washed away by the world itself. My eyes open, and I always wonder what exactly is going to hit me today? There's a daily rhythm of being slowly hammered into the ground; it never lets up. I look around and see everything that's gone. You are stripped down to the one final essential - the mind, restless mind, monkey mind, deconstructive mind. It's accounting prowess is incomparable - it never stops the endless, running tally of all that has been cast off, up, and away.

4. Ever Get The Feeling That You've Been Cheated?

Everything, as always, continues it's spiral. The rains begin. They were waiting for me - hail and phenomenal downdrafts and seismic convusions of thunder. Lightning - an impressive storm of it - doing its' dance; there is electricity around me, as always, it would seem. My very own trial by fire. The walk, as usual, goes on forever, and I slow down gradually, tired at the start of the day, worn down and run down already, blasted by the unsolicited harangue of nature itself. Lightning strikes again, very close, and I dart into a building, a big blockish monstrosity of 1960s architecture. Concrete and glass. The storm has knocked me into some place I do not recognize - I have no idea, and this building is vast - seas of cubicles that stretch on for miles it seems, long hallways with little windowless offices, little geometric caverns with glossy painted cinderblock walls. People dart about, papers in hand, distant murmurs, impromptu hallway conferences. I wander. I need help - within seconds, I will be late for work, and this will not be good. The deeper I travel into this building, the less certain of anything I'm becoming.

Still soaking from the storm, which howls and rages apocalyptically outside, I take a tiny eternity to make my way down yet another hallway. I peer into the open door of a randomly chosen office. An immaculately dressed Asian woman sits behind an L-shaped desk, hypnotized before a flat-screen monitor; occasionally she keys a figure into a spreadsheet. I stand, soaked, at the doorway for several seconds, the twin sounds of her typing and the random, periodic crashes and gusts accompanying the storm, which has lost none of its ferocity. "Ma'am, excuse me. I have somehow gotten lost, and I'm very sorry to interrupt, but I was wondering if you could direct me back to the front of the building." She casts a suspicious, inspecting glance in my direction. "I was on my way to work, I walk - and I ran in when the storm hit, and I'm still not precisely sure how I ended up here."

She saves the vast document filling her monitor and slowly turns in her office chair. She slowly crosses her hands and sighs. "I see. Give me one second, and I can lead you back out. For the moment, please have a seat." The office is desolate in its' plainness - the scattering of personal effects on the desk stand out in extreme relief. I slowly scan them all - a ceramic candy dish, nearly empty, with the generic logo of some random tourist destination. A photo of her and her husband, in the driveway of a rather large house. A handful of novelty post cards, simulated pop art scenes with mildly idiosyncratic messages worked into the design, cartoon-style. A coffee mug, with the logo of a mjor comupter company on one side. The cup is full, steaming, I can smell the coffee. "Where might I locate some of that coffee?" Another sigh. "Out the door, turn right. Left at first hallway, then two doors down, on the right. Look - I can lead you out, but I might be a few minutes. Just warning you in advance." I don't have a tremendous amount of choice in this matter, so I stand, and follow here directions, in dire need of fresh coffee. I call work en route, to let them know that I will be late, which I'm sure they've already figured out.

After a melodramatic conversatiion, filled with additional sighs, along with vague warnings to the general effect of "You are aware that David will be in today, right? This is not a good day for you to be running behind schedule - we got a business to run here after all," I find a clean mug (there's a character from an infant's television show emblazoned across the front - colorful creatures that dance and ululate incomprehensibles in an emotive fashion), thow in a quick shot of sugar and fill the mug with the not-exactly fresh coffee remaining in a dingy, globulent carafe. It has that slightly singed taste unique to old coffee, a taste that lets you know that this beverage will turn you into a nervous wreck in absolutely no time, but somehow, you're gonna drink it anyway. I slowly make my way back to the woman's office.

The spreadsheet is gone, replaced by some document filled with tiny print. She's scanning vaguely while conferring on the phone with what sounds to be a multitude of colleagues, some of whom are apparently located on different continents. Another crash from the storm outside. I stand and begin to survey the grey steel shelves at one end of the office. Mostly technical manuals, mixed in with a smattering of

By all means, have a nice day, and do please let me know if I can help you with anything.