So at long last I’ve seen Seven Samurai, which really should be closer to 4 samurai if you weight for alive-time. What’s interesting at first glance are how all of the dead ones die from gunshots only, undefeatable by oldschool means, the shared levity, the ambiguity of peasants, and the pain which no doubt the white audience has only seen on cnn about haiti. Still, the Japanese, being more recently conquered by these United States, are more relatable.
So I remember before I had neck pain before processing at a computer for more than a little while. Or is it that I’m much more often in front of a computer these days? It’s been a pretty good month so far, although there is going to be an ambush’s worth of work just around the corner with the next observations cycle and being advanced to candidacy can’t even happen before some other paper, er, work, heh, has to get done. So still a ways to go.
So I ate too much today, which is what happens when I have the chance to graze all day, across the borough of Queens, the sort of thing where one thing ends early but then another thing drags out and all you have to show for it is a Dutch oven.
So it took about three months but I finally made it out to the Met for their samurai exhibit. I don’t often go to museums, except on school trips, so this was rather different, and understanding the need to mediate the experience, I got notebooks with which to sketch. I’d been before to the arms and armor hallway with the Japanese arms, although I would learn later today that the proper name, um, the Hall of Emma and Georgina Bloomberg. Or something like that. Hrm.. Is there a closet naginataka at City Hall??
In contrast to the exhibits downstairs, the nice thing about the exhibition was that at least some of the armor was actually placed in the middle of the room so you could actually walk around it and take a look at the back. I am unfortunately not tall enough to see the hole in the top of the kabuto that Sensei always talks about. It’s also interesting because being a big-deal special exhibit means a lot more explanatory matter on the captions, which to me actually might inhibit the understanding and close appreciation of the piece. I actually know basically nothing about swords, but having held at least a few wooden ones, I know that the side is not the only way to look at a sword, so I was glad that for the swords that are actually at the edge of a row you could actually look down the tip. What impressed me was the thinness of the blades–really not like the shinai or bokuto that I handle daily, the sharpness of curvature, and the shortness of the tang. Having been trained in a martial art based upon the katana, I hadn’t though much about the other, one-handed weapons, although I suppose with koshirae everything is a lot more. The tsubas were also in many cases beautiful, especially the ones with the more subtractive styles. I spent a good deal of time also trying to sketch the cords as they were tied–I was surprised to find do-buttons! I thought those were just for kids! And of course the kabuto were real crowd-pleasers, in particular the bunny ears, swallow tail, and the windswept-hat.
Of course, being a Marxist, one can’t fully enjoy these things without thinking about how they are the result of stratification, upon stratification. Certainly visiting the Packard galleries, where I met a full-size Fudo Myo’o made me feel this way, because at least it didn’t seem like he was a computer guy who bought everything, but the fact that all of these places are stamped with the names of those who made nothing useful or beautiful like this does not please me, but I suppose one needs to accumulate symbolic capital with one’s objectified cultural capital one way or another. And this is probably another reason I don’t normally do museums, their tendency to pin things on the wall and render them two-dimensional, if that, or to narrate and define things which are labeled by year of acquisition and other such matters of provenance, rather having one experience the thing itself, or the closest approximation to that, at least.
Pleased by the inkstones and the amazing Chinese brushed art. Not overwrought like those European oils. Really should take that up again, as one only gets better with practice, but of course that’s hopeless because unlike kendo there is no social aspect to it at all.
So I’m thinking it would make more sense to have New Year’s like it used to be, at the beginning of April. Really now.
Anyway, for old times’ sake:
Asianboi roundup (cumulative)
Alric is the lake effect
Brian is either cobbled or stoned
Brother is not even drinking yet
Hoan is between vacations
Joephet is quite possibly on his way to being a partner
Justin is gainfully employed
Kean is lucky not to be in Times Square this year
Kenneth is being consulted
Mark is working out
Rico is well-positioned for tacos
Rob is profligate
Thet is still bouncing
Ty is suspected of being bicoastal
So I should know better by now.
So the good thing about gmail is leaving hotmail behind, but the bad thing about gmail is that you forget–and not looking back at when I used to actually craft emails to Joephet, in those days of absence and imagination, is the fundamental change between then and now, I think, the spaces now filled with facebook and whatnot–and of course the discontinuities I’ve imposed upon myself by not, for example, restoring my college harddrive which has on it endless emails, at the rate of one a day, which contrasts with my merely functional habits now. This blog as well.
So I woke up at 6 this morning and by instinct made a martini and started watching BSG. I don’t know what this means.
So this is what a full-night’s sleep feels like? Overdue. The dreams were strange, involving classroom observations and gawking at Moonies (they didn’t seem like Moonies, with their own coinage and an amusement park), and having my unwashed head grabbed at by pigeons drawn to my musk.
So I ask myself, what am I doing at 3:19 am? Having made a full dinner as Mark’s sous-chef, and having had a martini and a manhattan (two weeks without whiskey!), I am now in the process of finishing this bottle of Sauvignon Blanc which is rather serviceable as far as these things go. The Sunday routine is largely uninterrupted, and a balm. Sadly, the crunch of December will be far worse than what I’ve experienced up until now.
So I have become not so much nocturnal as sleep-three-hours-urnal.
So today: woke up at 10, after Mark left, dithered over suburi and such for quite some time, hungry but ate some sriracha peas, furious because no laundry card, condensing observation protocol, hope there are still backup dress shirts, played bushido blade, cheered up as always by suburi and then some pecs work too, ran for beer, made a pajeon, made a sidecar, passed out reading an old book, woke up, martini, blogging, writing at last.
So I was tutoring the senior son of the waitress where I had breakfast four years every Thursday, and it was difficult, because it was the SAT “Critical Reading”, which even without the analogies of old are challenging because although there is a great deal of reasoning that you can do and strategies you can de/employ to fill in all the blanks, there is a certain base line of vocabulary which you need to acquire, which I realized was no anomaly if you’ve been watching ST:TNG and prevents the needs for any sort of specious reasoning if you are up to date with the Simpsons circa, oh, 1995, but the problem is that habitus is transmitted along family lines and so when you won’t even read flashcards, I don’t think I can bump you up .7 standard deviations no matter how much you pay me, because after all there is no such things as free breakfast with rye toast.
So I realized that one major reason for the fall-off in terms of posts is that I no longer log in regularly to do the daily food blog and so there is less cross-posting, while the adjustments to the new routine are also far from settled enough to allow for any sort of routine in posting, which is what is necessary.
I realized how much Rob and I have a certain habitus the other day when two consecutive features in GQ were things that we have talked about extensively (brussels sprouts and martinis) and another page featured a former classmate getting a makeover. Small world.
Orlando right now really does feel like another world. Not the least because of the Disney thing and because of being immersed in this other academic subworld, but also because it’s only Wednesday and feels like a perpetual weekend down here, which I suppose for Mark it is, and on Monday I was working on some other project. I don’t suppose having taken a fifth job for the Spring it’s going to get any easier–Brooklyn here I come again!
So I’m unclear why there’s been such a hiatus, but part of it is that I’ve been writing so much that this has fallen off what I’m used to, and there are only so many words you have. Now that this first push for my dissertation is largely over, I feel there will be more to say, or rather more energy to say it. I still owe a habitus-of-Taiwan post and plenty of commentary on trips and culture.
So I’ve been complaining and eating way too much the past few days, since we’ve been rained in with no internet or anything, but at least the younger cousin has been around which means that we get out as a group more than not, with plenty of eating out at higher-end restaurants than I would even patronize in the States, though of course everything is half as much as otherwise.
The main wound to habitus and delay to the long-awaiated post is particularly the issue of internet access, although I have been accumulating lots of little bric-a-brac in the interim, which is not a bad thing at all, with just one more round of post-cards and most of the shopping done. I wonder if there’s any great variety of indigenous Taiwanese liquor I should sample…
So it’s been a real bore, sitting around the house and waiting for this typhoon to pass over, especially since there’s not much rain or wind to speak of yet, but in all likelihood I’ll miss keiko for a couple days and am too lazy to do any homebound exercises to make up for it. At least there’s the internet, but I can’t help but feel that I could be making better use of my time somehow else than purging my reader files. I suppose I should be working on the papers that are long overdue, but I excuse myself because the source materials are elsewhere, and it’s not as if I haven’t done my Chinese lessons for the day. I suppose this is the hump, and it would have been better if I had fallen sick about now rather than when travel to Taipei were still possible. But I suppose it could be worse and there’s plenty of electricity and wifi for the moment. I should write, at least.
So soon the post on habituses, but for now just catching my breath and the record heat and relaxing after a weekend of running around town with family and for kendo. It’s halfway through the trip and feels a little later than that, I suppose, but in a good way: that I’ve settled in but realize the limitations of making a living here, not without a great deal more book-learning and language–the local dialect I’m only beginning to pick up stray consonant substitutions and nouns in, and it would take ages to be comfortable. The best expression to describe the insufferable heat however, is, translated into English, “It’s so hot that when people get into scooter accidents they jump up from the asphalt, it’s so hot!”
So I lost the last post thanks to the sporadic nature of my email, but I guess that’s not the end of the world. Day by day I’ve been slowly expanding what it is familiar to me, although the mental maps are rather more difficult. The bootstrapping in terms of my language abilities has also been a little encouraging: one word unlocks so many others, and the reinforcement in multiple contexts is also a great help. I have been copying newspaper articles and reading the dictionary, but also engaging in daily tasks such as buying cloth. The main issue is how to maintain these skills when I get back to the States: that’s a lot less certain, I think.
So wireless, and therefore a part of my brain, has been restored, although the torpidity of afternoon naps and reading the dictionary (!) will perhaps be missed, but with a whole month to spend here, I should take my time and enjoy everything rather than rush into it all. It’s been nice the mixture of the local with the superurban as expressed in the supermodern supercity of Taipei with the superoutofdate orthography for the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, with a whole lot of medals, I must admit, but not even a one picture of him with Mao or any other communist, I suppose. The food has been of course phenomenal and cheap–if it weren’t for all the of home-cooking of course it would be cheap, even though the conversions are not quite yet second-hand to me just yet. Settling in well and starting to think about getting serious about the work, as there are still relatively few distractions compared to New York.
So sitting in a hotel lobby in Japan before breakfast is not quite what I had expected I’d be doing right now, but that’s okay. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about travel, it’s that you need to provide yourself with at least a 20% cushion for expected expenses and delays. At least we made curfew at Narita. A shame that the window isn’t big enough for me to make it to any local bogu-ya: I am really tempted to buy a new doh, not because the old one is all scratchy, but because it’s a little big on me.
On the other hand, leaving New York was a pain: 7 train down, a cab, an unfinished huitlacoche quesadilla, an F train, a desperate attempt to catch a cab, and then early to JFK for a plane that was delayed twice for six hours. At least because it was mechanical we got comped shit. Otherwise…
Now to do this last led, before my legs fully collapse for good.
So the odometer-turning post comes from Evanston, out of town for a conference and some good networking among another large group of people that I don’t know but will soon. It’s been helpful to push me outside of my customary languor and to actually do some good writing for it all. The weather is perfect, and the food is free. But I really need to figure out a better way to have Mark travel with me to some of these events, even if the interest int he work isn’t there, there are plenty of sights.
So I don’t quite remember the last time I really cooked, but today was certainly back in the saddle: breakfast was steak and eggs and home fries, and then dinner involved roasting beets and making a garlic-bacon stuffing.
So there are definite advantages to being all retired-like, I suppose: just need to get writing on some other projects!
So last night was somewhat of a haze, but an at home haze, which is always better–somehow my circadian rhythms have become reattuned to allow both for late night dinners at the local Mexican as well as drunken geocoding. I’m getting damn good at this geocoding business and will need to bill my other boss for some of the work I’m about to do. Time to get a real desktop, though.
So this would be the last week that I’m at the office, and there are lots of things still to clean, somehow. It’s odd too to think of the deliveries that I’ve had at the office over the last five years: most of my kendo gear, innumerable books, contact lenses, and of course the actual office supplies that one should actually have delivered, ever. I guess there was also the small matter of a stolen computer. Hrm. The losses we just write off to ourselves, which even Amex can’t help with.
