It appears that I am geared to turn sixteen at the end of this week (I started counting the years backwards a while back).
In celebration, a couple merry friends and I, will be drinking, spinning records and being a general nuisance to the gentle people of Shibuya, on
So feel free to pop by and have a drink or ten with us !
You know there are serious problems with your motivation levels when you’d rather spend the day reading up Agrawal’s [sublimely elegant but entirely irrelevant] PRIMES is in P paper than do actual work.
Stuff is piling up way faster than I can find time or motivation to write it out. Let’s try to see if we can remember some of the main events of the past couple days. Keitai pics are coming soon too.
Left Tokyo for the barren wilderness of Yokohama’s suburbs, joined Miss Sin, Sandy & family for some authentic Blues tunes in Japanese at Blue Corn.
Went to a birthday party at what might very well be Tokyo’s most obscure bar. Luke had mentioned something about the place being something like “an apartment/bar”… Aya’s directions included stuff like “ring #401 and tell them you’re a friend to get in”. After being let in the most residential-looking building of the most residential-looking neighbourhood of southern Tokyo, after ringing the inconspicuous apartment door, after walking past the doorstep, taking off my shoes and being shown to the end of a long corridor, I was fully expecting to walk into the Tanaka family’s apartment living room: I found myself standing in the middle of an actual unlicensed bar, complete with couches, hardtop bar counter, DJ booth and people ordering food and drinks as if they’d be sitting at their local dive. The place had its own business cards and is called The Hidden Lounge. Definitely go check it out if you ever have a chance.
Had a meeting and chatted with Ashimo‘s dad. Just work and stuff, but had to mention it and gloat, given how absolutely utterly über-nerdly cool that is.
Had a housewarming BBQ party of sorts at my new [temporary] place in Shimo-takaido. Blended industrial quantities of margarita and mojitos. Took half the party with me (leaving Tracey behind with the other half) just on time for last train to Misakiguchi beach, Kanagawa, where we arrived just after midnight…
You know you have made it to the real Japanese wilderness, when the one and only combini store in the area is a fifteen minute walk and closes at night. Twenty minutes walking through fields in complete darkness, much laborious searching along the coastline (with some serious flashbacks to the days of trying to locate underground Californian parties in the most improbable locales) and we finally found our Japanese neo-hippie Eldorado. By all accounts, it was definitely worth it. Much dancing and partying on the beach was indulged until morning and beyond (for some). Beach parties still are my favourite.
Less fun, was the nasty eye inflammation I had neglected to take care of all weekend, finally upping it a couple notches on Sunday morning, making for a hasty return home, nearly blind and rather pitifully hanging onto Rie’s arm for directions. Lead the following Monday to Masako&Nordine’s kindly taking me on my first visit ever to a Japanese medicine man and my learning to say “acute inflammation of the iris” and “what the hell were you thinking waiting so long before consulting” in Japanese. Much Atropine eyedropping and lying at home in the dark ensued.
Recovered about just in time for T’s glamorous birthday party at Golden Gai’s Araku. Stood the crazy heat and spent the night being merry with the better half of Tokyo’s gaijin and gaijin-friendly shock troops.
Capped the night with much drinking outside of Golden Gai’s seediests with Rie and Jim. Jim’s stories sound straight out of a Murakami (Haruki) novel. Except he has got pics to back it up.
Had drinks with Yi at our usual Shinjuku hangout (where she is slowly starting to become a regular herself). Since both 5-seat bar and upstairs room were packed, we got to enjoy the truly surreal sight from the rooftop makeshift lounge. Sitting with our drinks in the middle of Shouben Yokochou, except outdoor, looking down on hundreds of tiny ramshackle bars, Shinjuku’s high-rise blinking neons above in the distance and absolutely not a human soul in sight. A truly weird Mary Poppins in Tokyo-moment.
Also: drinking, firework, drinking, food of all sorts, drinking, art expos, drinking etc.
Upcoming: more of the same. My birthday party on the 24th in Shibuya: much drinking, partying and live electro tunes to be had (come on all, you’re all invited !).
Spending the night drinking in Aoyama and dancing in Shibuya until morning with Deny and friends, 6 hours after landing in Narita.
Yoshida-san at Albatross, casually wishing me a welcome back, asking how I’m doing, as if it had not been two years since the last time I sat there ordering a drink.
Soon-to-be-official-geisha Hako-chan, demonstrating her shamisen skills at a tiny Shibuya izakaia, before going on a drunken quest for some old Pink Floyd albums at nearby Tower records.
Sheer serendipity and Saeko’s MBA program being located 6 floors down from my lab in the same Jimbocho building.
Drinking our asses off with Yi, Jun & co., enjoying Kaikan Hotel’s Beer Garden‘s “All you can drink” formula until the very last minute (and the last dozen hastily ordered pints).
Tokyo clubbing. Receiving a freshly removed pair of lacy underwear adorned with the wearer’s phone number. Having never asked for it in the first place.
Hello, I am back within reach of Interweb technologies.
As it turned out, a silly software glitch made my parting promise of auto-posted goodness a complete lie. Actually, all for the best, since honestly, they weren’t the most mesmerizing pieces of writing…
After a short stop at an undisclosed south-east Asia location where I was to acquire some new secret power after undergoing mysterious ritual ceremonies, I am now in Tokyo. Currently working as a visiting researcher for a government-funded organization until late September, devising new and better ways to enslave the human race and take over the world.
I am not quite sure what’s in store for this blog over the Summer, seeing how I resumed my Japanese blog (no point clicking if you do not read Japanese, also even less point clicking if you are learning Japanese, given the appalling level of grammar on display there). Keeping one blog updated is hard enough as it is, let alone two of these things. I might keep this one at a casual pace for the Summer, with mostly photographic updates (as soon as I’ll have set the keitai blog back up again).
If you happen to live in Tokyo and feel like getting together for a glass of shochu or twenty, by all mean get in touch: anything that’ll give me an excuse to slack on my work duties these days…
I’m off to greener shores for the Summer.
Funnily enough, update frequency will be the best it has been in a while, since I am leaving behind a couple inconsequential pre-posted entries to fill space at regular intervals until I regain full access to 21st century technologies.
Estimated resurfacing time (in a different location, but with the same standard of sharp, yet insightful, educational writing that you have come to expect from this blog) in a couple days or weeks. Possibly more, if some loose rooftop tile prompts me to embark on a spiritual quest to discover my totem animal by moving to a Nepalese buddhist temple.
Meanwhile, have a picnic or two on île Saint-Louis on my behalf.
Names and situations have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent (me). For clarity purposes, some bits that may have been merely thought at the time, are fully spelt out here.
A bit over a year ago, last class of the semester:
Prof. Travoltus: And I wish you all a successful career and might see you again one day, shall you decide to go for a post-grad in AI.
Dave: Does that mean you are involved in that curriculum too? Oh god, no.
Prof. Travoltus: Indeed I am. And don’t worry, I hate your guts too.
Dave: Why, thanks. You are quite a tool yourself.
Prof. Travoltus: You little arrogant piece of self-sufficient shit. Don’t you think I didn’t notice your constant sneering at every other one of my [very unfunny] jokes and comments, all semester long.
Dave: Same to you sir. By the way, 1970 called and it wants its corduroy bellbottoms back. ‘said you could keep the pungent cologne, though.
Because this phase of intense self-absorbed navel-contemplation passing off as thoughtful meditation just isn’t about to end now…
I suppose I still have ten hours (sleep notwithstanding) to acquire a motivation, snort 10g of crushed Red Bull powder and catch up on two weeks worth of revisions.
Will I ? Fuck if I know. Suspense is killing me.
Sara: Yea, he is a bit strange, very moody, the autistic kind, you know… talks a lot, all the time…
Dave: Autistic? talks a lot? That doesn’t make sense… Wouldn’t an autistic temperament imply that he is overly quiet and keeping to himself most of the time?
Sara: Absolutely not! What are you talking about? He’s autistic… Has those weird fits of enthusiasm, gets excited about the smallest things, you know, the way autistic people often behave…
Dave: OK. You aren’t making any sense. We can’t possibly be talking about the same definition for autism, real or pretend.
Sara: Autism??? Who talked about autism, he is autistic: he makes aut, he’s an autist… He paints mostly.
Dave: Oh…
Wherein the author unabashedly stares at his navel while describing in painfully boring details his past and current academic endeavours under the guise of introducing some of the topics bound to become a fixture of this blog.
As morbidly obsessed faithful readers of this blog may remember, I made a decision 18 months ago to go back to school and try for one of these fancy post-graduate degree in Compooter Thingies.
As it happen, my original bachelor was mostly centered around Mathematics and Physics, two sciences that turned out to make for infinitely more entertaining conversation topics than university majors (also, it was sorta interspersed with half a dozen other totally unrelated course of studies). Having come to develop uncontrollable rash-like allergic reactions to the mere mention of either topic, it sounded wise to shift the focus of my academic pursuits over to a slightly different major. Hence Computer Science, or to be exact: Artificial Intelligence (which is, to paraphrase some guy, as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes). As for the “going-back-to-university” thing altogether, it was mostly motivated by the pointed realization that, of the entire spectrum of available jobs, university student was the one I was most happily fitted for: After being a corporate droid for many years, a beach bum for another couple, I figured being paid a [rather mediocre] salary to work on cool research projects while learning semi-interesting things, sounded like a very fun way to pass time before retiring to a desert island in the Indian Ocean. That and the possibility that I may one day be responsible for the enslavement of humanity under the cold, merciless dominion of superiorly intelligent thinking machines.