The Courts of Bangkok

 Over the past 20 years or so, the term “Mid-Century Modern” has made its way first, from an outre hipster preference, or what would get called an “aesthetic” nowadays, to a standard term within the layman’s design discussion, to its final form, something dangerously close to being turned into mere cliché (let’s call this process “steampunking”).

A certain irony, given the degree to which the principles of mid-century design were quickly disparaged after the peak years of the design idiom.

Cultural liberals would evoke mid-century modernism as the aesthetic representation of the horrors of Stepford-wivery, of Levittown’s postwar American garishness, of the final victory of mass production over the natural world, of the arrogance of better living through chemistry, of the last dying gasp of the hegemonic straight white male patriarch.

Conversely, conservatives would seek a return to more conservative form, to flowery Laura Ashley living room sets, to the first suburban McMansions with their fanlights and cathedral ceilings and other echoings of previous eras (funny how the conservatives were OK with this form of postmodernism), mewling equivalents to a doddering old ham declaring that it was morning in America.

Now, I’ll always argue that an aesthetic principle can, to a certain extent, be decoupled from its point of origin (certified author-killer up in here), but it’s hard when looking at mid-century modern furniture, architecture, and product design not to be enraptured to a certain degree by this past moment of unbridled optimism, when the future still seemed shiny.

I started with a metal desk and a manual typewriter purchased at a school auction when I was a teenager, and now I have the whole package.

For the past several years, I have woken up every morning to my teak parquet floor, to high clerestory windows. To the sun slanting in through those windows, and through the screen patio door, designed to let just the right amount of sunlight in but to not overheat, with high ceilings to cool the air, a building truly constructed with the monsoon climate in mind. I can step out onto my cool tile patio, with the wicker cage around the hanging light, palms and bougainvilleas whispering outside, something of a vision of a jet-age tropical paradise, Viewfinder slides of the lands of stone idols and bronze Buddhas and drooping serapes in the high-modern decades between the signing of the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri and the appointment of Paul Volcker as the chair of the Federal Reserve.

I can hear the opening chords of a Joni Mitchell song as I pour my French press, leftover charcuterie and dry Riesling in the fridge, with no comment as to why the Cathay Pacific stewardesses at the party last night were sniffling so much after coming back from the bathroom.

But what I am living in is a remnant of a remnant.

My apartment is what is known as a “court” in this town, a term widely applied to the apartment buildings of the 1960s and 1970s built as Bangkok transformed from a raggedy and malarial third-world outpost to an international city, as Yankee GIs did their resting and relaxing (and a whole lot else), as Thais in pursuit of the good life for the first time turned their eyes more towards Los Angeles than Hong Kong. And I live in one such building.

 

 

They’re disappearing, slowly. Torn down to make room for higher buildings in the city’s most expensive districts, left to rot. Hell, they already ripped out the tennis court and put in a KFC.

And yet this translates into a sort of Gothic splendor.

What portent is there in the rotting concrete beams? In the members of the old and well-connected family who live in the houses along the perimeter of the property, dying off one by one? In the relief sculpture of the mermaids by the pool, cracking, House of Usher-style before falling apart completely, only to be followed by the papaya tree that crashed into the pool the next day?

More than a few people have commented on the similarity of my court to that portrayed in the (mediocre) BBC miniseries The Serpent, about the life of Charles Sobhraj, the bastard son of a Saigon whore, a teenage petty criminal turned hanger-on of the glittering Parisian high society of the Gainsbourg/Bardot era, before becoming a sort of Charles Manson of Southeast Asia, carrying out the murders of backpackers on Ngam Du Phli Road – what was then the backpacker ghetto, and coincidentally where I first stayed – with the help of a ragtag band of deluded Western hippie girls. His actual killings took place at a court called Kanit House, once one of several in the neighborhood, just across the street from my own court, torn down sometime in the 1990s.

The series was filmed, too, in an old court in seedy Sukhumvit Soi 4, likewise about to be demolished at time of filming.

You still see the concrete panels tumbling, woodwork ripped out, ready for the new “smart building” office complexes and condos designed for Chinese and Saudi money launderers.

I too am waiting for a deal to be finalized, for another bit of Bangkok during the era when the country was thought of as a critical domino, when Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn and his men slithered through the city at the behest of Kissinger and McNamara and all the rest. When real money first flowed into this town en masse, accompanied by Chinook helicopters, and the crisis of modernity suddenly arrived, optimism and terror intertwined.

Once again, we look backwards to remember what forwards was supposed to look like.

Walking With Sebald

When I read Carole Angier's recent biography of W.G. Sebald, Speak, Silence, which, while much-feted, is really quite a pointless tome, the one thing that I kept coming back to is the degree to which Sebald the writer is absent from Sebald's novels, despite the fact that, “he,” W.G. Sebald is the main character of all of them, morosely wandering through Antwerp and the East Anglian marshes. We don't get much of Sebald – sure, we get a few biographical descriptions, but even when he talks about himself, he never talks about himself as he is now, but about his childhood on the southern fringe of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and the sense of dislocation from that particular time and place. Really, it's the time and the place that take center stage.

Perhaps this seems a heresy in which an age in which, given the relative anonymity and disconnectedness of digital interactions, one's existence boils down to one's identity markers. How many comments have you seen prefaced with “As a...” online? Despite the fact that all of Sebald's novels are ostensibly rooted in personal experience, he refuses to categorize himself, and lets the absences do the talking – absence of family and close friends, absence of nation, absences of language, memory, sight, thought.

It seemed inevitable, given my trajectory through Borges and Calvino, that I would inevitably arrive at Sebald, but it was only when I was 20 or so that a copy of The Rings of Saturn was lent to me by the woman who had once been the girl down the block.

The plot, such as it is, is impossibly simple – Sebald attempts to walk the length of Suffolk. As he explores landscape, he meditates on the many ways in which his experience is coded in geography, biology, anthropology, and history, particularly the history of the many violences that constitute the story of human civilization.

Which made perfect sense for a grumpypuss like me. And so as I expanded my own horizons, Sebald's ghost became more apparent.

Consider:

Late last year I was walking outside the old Bohemian town of Aussig (Usti nad Lobem since 1945), in one of those anonymous stretches of European semi-countryside, with steel I-beams littering the marginal ways and 1960s panelak apartments abutting the rye fields, an occasional beer sign referencing the peasant idyll, a soft autumn rain falling along the Elbe.

And yet as I approached the star fortress at the end of the road, I felt a sudden spasm in my right leg, as if the very ground beneath me was bound to give out, and despite the pain, I persisted forward through the vacant streets of the garrison, its sides lined with brick ramparts, the homes once occupied by Jews in their last ghetto before deportation to points north and east now occupied by Czechs with dented Volkswagen hatchbacks, waves of pain radiating through my shin muscles as I traced the brick-lined tunnels of the fortress.

I stumbled back into the town square, my leg in agony, to find a little shop with the word “coffee” written out in little red light bulbs, to get a desultory brown Americano and some little pastries spread with jam made from aronia berries, a small and peculiar berry with a deep and astringent taste reminiscent of ruby port, native to the Eastern woodlands of North America and yet transplanted and more popular here in the Slavic forests, yet recently introduced into commercial agriculture in the boggy lands of Northern Iowa, the vicinity in which Antonin Dvorak, himself a son of the nearby Melnik District, composed his New World Symphony – another of the many ways in which the route of the Cedar River mirrors that of the Moldau.

This would be a Sebaldian moment regardless. What I had forogtten was that Sebald's Jacques Austerlitz had walked this same path, on his way to the garrison town of Theriesenstadt, built by Empress Maria Theresa in the 18^th Century around a star fortress, a specialty of Austerlitz's, and he had walked this road twice, first as a child and then as a man retracing his own paths. And yet I had somehow forgotten the location of this critical journey, despite my having remembered the character of Jacques Austerlitz as an expert in the history of the star fortress, his childhood during the ghettoization processes, and his visit to the spa town of Marienbad, his ice cream stiffened with potato starch remaining unmelted. The reason for this lapse in memory remained uncertain – I didn't even think about it until later that night in my hotel room in Prague.

And that moment, the sudden spasms of agony in my leg. It seemed remarkable to me that Sebald's other novels are marked by moments of intense physical distress, the hospital stay in The Rings of Saturn, the sudden attack of blindness in Vertigo. Is it Sebald's ghost? Or is it some unspoken universal pattern of physical pain and psychic gloom, the transformation of oneself into a lens?

So what can I say about the artist who called me the other day from the cliffsides of Nice, asking me what I knew about star fortresses?

Invisible Enemies

Todd Field's Tar had the extreme misfortune to be cast as a culture-war movie. In the opinion of both the smug, legacy conservative media (or what is left of it), and the equally smug, culturally liberal media (what is often described as “left” in a world in which leftist hope has been abandoned), Lydia Tar was a misunderstood brain-genius who gets cancel culture'd, a lesbian who metoo'd other lesbians, a waking meme who totally wrecked that SJW in her lecture (the number of quotation marks attached to these terms will vary depending on one's political tendencies). Richard Brody at the New Yorker, whose dumb, contrarian takes on film (and to be fair, whose occasional incisive and cutting contrarian takes on film) have become a staple, was one such commentator. Even Eileen Jones at Jacobin, whose opinions I make a point to listen to, seems to have missed the point entirely.

What defines Lydia Tar, more than almost anything else, is her absolute lack of connection, despite appearances to the contrary. Sure, she's got that CV rapturously listed off by Adam Gopnik at the beginning, basking in the spotlight, but what we see throughout the rest of the film is a person who treats her partner like garbage, treats her child as little more than an addendum, treats lovers as cast-offs, treats other members of the music community as little more than chess pieces to be moved, and has a shall we say tenuous relationship with truth.

But let's take a look at that most chatterable of scenes, Tar v. “BIPOC pangender” student. I don't want to dissect it in detail – plenty of ink on that already, plenty of mostly dumb videos on Youtube by armchair film critics on the same subject – but I do want to call attention to the way in which the argument is, at the end of the day, not so much an argument as a stemwinding piece of oratory by Lydia Tar, barely punctuated by the objections of the whimpering and stimming undergrad. I get it, dialogue in films is not supposed to actually sound like real life... but the tone here is so polished as to make it seem imaginary.

And so it put me in mind of the arguments one has in one's head in the shower, or moodily waiting in line, or waiting to fall asleep. The invisible enemies we fight.

It's a tendency I've mostly beaten, albeit a very natural tendency when one's mind is drifting – to conjure up these invisible enemies for invisible argument, which end, naturally, in one's own invisible victory. In other words, the cartoon trope of the black-eyed kid kicking a can and muttering to himself as he walks down the street, vowing to one day stand up to the schoolyard bully.

I used to think I was alone in this – that this was the product of my uniquely chaotic and drooling mind. But that, as with all forms of self-loathing, is an act of utter and complete narcissism. Which, given the very narcissistic nature of an imaginary fight one wins, makes this a case of reflections falling in love with reflections falling in love with reflections, an infinite regress of the self.

And like its kindred infinite regresses of the self, I can't help but suspect that this is a phenomenon greatly amplified by the internet age – in a world of forums and tweets, the invisible enemies suddenly render themselves visible while bowling alone. Especially in an era of unprecedented spatial isolation in the more developed world, one can pick one's own enemy. Or a whole suite of enemies, a Scorpion for every Subzero.

To continue the theme of narcissism, I must come to the conclusion that many people have projected their own invisible arguments onto me. I assume I've been the problematic straight white guy, the stoopid lib'rul, the postmodern neo-whatever, the punchable face, the general imbecile.

And therefore, we ourselves have the capacity to be an invisible enemy. Even if we accept the fact that most of these projections are entirely dependent on undeserved preconceptions, I must conclude that at least some are accurate. And, second therefore, I have to wonder how many people peg me for the bastard I really am.

Do I have any choice or agency as to how I am interpreted?

As my steps fall, I have to wonder what ghostly forms I leave in my wake.

Neomania and the Black Monolith

I'd always assumed that the older you got, the more constrained and normalized the chance interpersonal encounters would become. The stoned hug goodbye with an old friend, the 2 a.m. thinking the homeless man with the Rhodesian ridgeback is some kind of wise sage, the awkward attempts to seem more knowledgable looking at a menu on a date, all to be replaced – presumably by children's birthday parties and barista pleasantries and conversations about mortgage APR.

And yet the older I get, the less this seems to be true. If anything, I keep finding myself among more and more oddities. Is this just a specific circle of circumstances? Well, yes. But the fact that such a circle exists, and is wide enough for my dumb ass to wander into it suggests, at the very least a strong counternarrative. I'd call it the world's shittiest Bloomsbury Set, because I think that's funny, but that does devalue people I value, so let's call it “the world's shittiest Bloomsbury Set” in especially large quotation marks. And the circumstances I find myself in which are also more and more curated in their weirdness, whether that is a particularly strange book I seek out, or whether that is a relationship with someone it seems I would have a decent enough time drowning together with.

Hence the chance encounters that leave one with dawn goodbyes, after a night of hearing stories about how their Lexapro isn't working anymore, about their sexual inadequacies, about the looming abysses that lie ahead... It's temping to think that the times have gotten themselves stranger. But that's not exactly a quantifiable thing, now. It seems to be, and we've probably all said it – shit has gotten weird. But I have to think that to a certain degree, the reason I wind up in the places I do, with the people I do, is a symptom of a certain neomania.

This seems not to be a particularly widespread term. Perhaps it ought to be.

I think it's self-explanatory. I could say something about Blaise Pascal blaming all of humanity's problems on man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. And the way in which I slowly feel myself finding that room alone increasingly frightening, about the way in which the cracks in the ceiling paint seem to taunt me, the way in which my sofa cushions are increasingly rough, as if I'm trapped in an edifice waiting for it to collapse around me.

Or a certain Macedonian and his fear of there being no more lands left to conquer.

Maybe this is why I pore over things obsessively. My lists of books to read, movies to watch, recipes and restaurants try, imaginary trips. And this is why I rarely reread books, rewatch movies, go back to the same restaurants, visit the same city twice. It's always have to try this, have to try this, have to make sure I sample the whole goddamn buffet. Maybe this is why I feel the compulsive need to always keep moving.

“Ennui” is what you call being bored when it's supposed to be meaningful boredom.

And maybe it's a symptom of the condition whereby for, as long as I can remember, something just felt intrinsically wrong about the moment I found myself in (at the risk of sounding like I'm in a group therapy session for troubled teens). Because it does sound childish, doesn't it? It's the sort of #notliketheothergirls attitude that is far less attractive to others after one's mid-20s. You're supposed to, at some point, find your tribe, and then we're told things get better from there. But do they?

“It was a good enough performance as far as performances go” – Saint Joan of Brentwood

Beyond personal social failings, the human passion for neomania has a tendency – as Pascal alluded to -- to lead to bad shit. It has a tendency to lead to strenuous days and hazy nights and worse mornings, an infinite number of pregnancy scares and maudlin weeping, 3 a.m. cocaine breakfast clubs turning to 11 a.m. cocaine shits and screamingly dehydrated hangovers, every miserable gray Sunday twilight, and every other thing that seems one more step on the path towards a miniature and highly personalized day of the locust. And these are of course far, far, from the worst set of outcomes, at the levels of either personal or social wellbeing.

“He didn't mean to be rude, but at first glance this man seemed an exact model for the kind of person who comes to California to die.” – Nathanael West, writing about an Iowan. Of course he was.

But I have to think that this isn't just a personal failing, but – being the historical materialist good boy that I am – a product of conditions. To a certain degree, this is life at this particular wilting moment of late-stage capitalism, after the end of the monoculture. When all information is available, and everything is a niche of one sort or another, collecting all the Pokemon seems to be a natural step.

Even the individual lines from T.S. Eliot's “The Hollow Men” have become unbearable cliches.

But that's the social dimension of life after the ostensible end of history. There's also the psychic dimension, the sort of Mark Fisher despair that comes with living in a world in which the future has been inevitably postponed, and the futures that are there seem grim. At the end of the Roman Empire, the educated young men either drank the last drops of garum and silphium and Liburnian olive oil and plowed their catamites in a final orgiastic purge, or they perched themselves on top of the ruins that dotted the Syrian desert. And in another moment of panic in the 1930s, there were the mustachioed playboys who drank Champagne with chorus girls as their fathers' companies entered receivership, and there were the jobless flagpole sitters trying to win the AM radio prize.

“As we get older the difference between freedom and loneliness is often only differentiated by the quality of the light” – Achewood

The inverse of neomania is the moment when there is no more newness. There is only the past. And that's fucking terrifying. Dave passes through the multicolored vortex, and he's left, wrinkled, in his Baroque chamber, before the black monolith appears at the foot of his bed, an eerie glow to the floor.

I'm haunted by dreams I have of everyone I've hurt, standing ankle deep in running water, light flickering on the mottled surface.

And I'm haunted by the thought of a future, each irrational hope having slowly evaporated, orange light pouring in through the smeared window, as I sit in my leather armchair, my breathing hoarse, a cat across my ankles, remembering a time when I once thought there was something beyond the horizon.

What black monolith will I see?

The Anxiety of Obsolescence

As the Writers Guild of America continues its strike, issues of AI replacing human writers have come to the fore. It feels mildly shitty to even feel the need to write on this subject for my own posterity, but here I am.

Rafts of reports are coming out by ex-writers-of-some-stripe now laid off, which garner plenty of clicks for obvious reasons – it is the grand-guignol, the murder podcast.

Of course people who match my rough demographic are more online than anyone else whose livelihood has been placed on the chopping block, and are also at least superficially more anxiety-prone. It shouldn't shock anyone that the desperate freelance writer has been more lucky in making his voice heard versus, say, the average Ohio steelworker or Oaxacan peasant.

Never mind that the work output of the average AI is drivel – anyone who talks about how “shockingly real” ChatGPT is needs to acquaint themselves with quality writing, human beings, or both. This is where I would direct the reader to the vast library of hype-skeptical and limitation-aware writings on the subject, ranging from John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus back in the day to Evgeny Morozov today, who have both the technical knowledge and the space that I don't.

But the fact that it is drivel is irrelevant. Google results are already filling up with the sludge of SEO-friendly, automatically written content that is at best the precise content equivalent of a pair of Gap chinos.

 

“Hey hey, how about that weather out there?”

“Whoa, that was the caller from Hell”

“Hot dog! We have a wiener!”

“Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.”

- The DJ 3000, episode 17 of season 5 of The Simpsons, “Bart Gets an Elephant”

Worse, it has the charm of a single brochure left posted to an office corkboard, neglected for months, to the point where you wonder why it's there. Worse yet – and I'm hardly the first to make this comparison – it's reminiscent of the Elsagate videos from a few years ago, pileups of cultural signifiers, arranged in an algorithmically logical manner that is absurd to humans, but highly consumable by small children, if likely to trigger deep unease in adults.

I first got my start getting paid to write by working in a post-2008 content mill with an exceptionally slutty business model and a vintage Galaga machine in the breakroom, churning out a massive volume of work for embarrassingly little pay, one of the few benefits being that I got to work in a field at which I knew I had actual talent.

It felt even then like we were working in a remnant of a remnant of an economy that had once existed. Decomposers, in other words. I assume that, being at their approximate position, they outsourced their writing to the Global South years ago, if they still exist. And I have no doubt that the Filipinos, Indians, or Kenyans they hire will be made redundant soon enough.

As with every bit of Silicon Valley bullshit, AI-related disruptions are effusively described in terms of decentralization, democracy, and freedom, without any mention made as to long-term knock-on effects. I would say that if you praise sudden mass job losses as market efficiency, you should seriously consider whether or not you have basic human empathy, but thankfully this is a witheringly small number of evangelists. Yet the general percentage of the public that is aware of such arguments – if I'm reading the mood correctly – broadly recognizes their messages as bullshit, but also realizes the lack of viable options moving forward.

“You all should pay attention what's happening to us because they're coming for you next.” - Virginia Eubanks, quoting a mother in Indiana in Automating Inequality

I really don't want to be a Cassandra here, but this is an honest assessment. In no versions of the story of the fall of Troy do things end up well for Cassandra, I should add. And what's especially dismal? Like so many technologies, neural-network technologies have the potential to be a tool for human development rather than a generator of share value. And so it becomes another canceled future, the precursor to the liberation of humans from drudgery, thereby transformed into the agent of upward transfer of wealth.

As a result, I tend not to think of an apocalyptic future, but a world of life in little greige boxes, horizons truncated.

“Why are you being so negative?” says the chubby and terrifyingly jolly man in a Hawaiian shirt, comfortably ensconced in a big-four accounting firm, that I meet at a party.

I'm fairly good at landing on my feet. Right now, I'm in a relative catbird seat. I'm not scared for the now, I'm scared for the five years from now, or longer, and the incipient precarity of the increasingly less discernible future. Both with regards to my own livelihood, and with regards to the countless others – many of whom will doubtless be people I care about – who will find themselves replaced by very shitty but very cost-effective automatic processes.

Daily life continues unabated. I meet friends, work out, read books, cook nice things. But I am increasingly haunted by the thought of how long I'll be able to do so.

The Terraforming of Hokkaido

 How many absolutely boring pieces of writing are there about the ineffable Japanese aesthetic? How many treatises on cherry blossoms and kimonos, how much lazy garbage about the effortless blend of the modern and the traditional?

Or as you may have said in a 7^th grade geography report, a laaaaand of contraaaasts.

And I can't say I've ever been particularly taken by the traditional aesthetics more than those of any other country – sure, I appreciate a gorgeous Zen temple, but I can't say I'll be sitting down to a tea ceremony anytime soon – and the standard-issue pop-culture exports have always left me cold, other than a handful of Studio Ghibli offerings and Murakami novels, and a few baked-as-fuck viewings of Dragonball Z in my teens.

But I do love Japan. And thus it was that I found myself in the country yet again, this time in Hokkaido.

What I truly love, the thing that really keeps me coming back for more, is something likewise ineffable, but somehow the inverse of the standard message. It is not some harmonious marriage of the old and the new, the local and the global, but the precise opposite – the way in which the global is completely broken down into constituents, then rebuilt through the lens of the local, with little attention paid to the original design.

Consider the town of Otaru, half an hour north of Sapporo. It's one of the few places where a significant amount of the architecture of the Taisho and early Showa Periods in the early 20^th Century has been preserved, a rarity in a country where everything is either 10 or 1000 years old. Otaru stayed a backwater as more and more governmental and commercial affairs moved to Sapporo, and along its icy coast, bits of the newly industrial Japan have remained unchanged.

This isn't to say it's terribly historic – in this sense, it has no more concentration of historical architecture than the average Midwestern county seat, and in fact probably far less. Rather, what makes it interesting, is the particular architectural vocabulary, rendered in concrete and marble. You see touches of Gotham art deco, echoes of the American civic variation of Beaux-Arts, Doric columns and meander motifs taken from Greek revival, a Bavarian half-timber here and there – even a Soviet mosaic left from attempts to seek diplomacy across the Sea of Okhotsk. I step inside an old civic building to purchase snacks and local wines as gifts, and it is cozy and old-fashioned in the same way a small town American post office with WPA murals is. And yet while the ideas were imported, the construction comes from an entirely different reference point.

Less an imitation than a full-scale terraform. And those local wines? Made from forgotten American grape varieties, Niagara and Delaware and Campbell Early, wines with the musky and foxy flavor of a Ray Bradbury summer day in a hallucination of a Midwestern town on Mars.

It was a pattern I noticed when I set foot in Bar Yamazaki, an institution located on the fourth floor of an anonymous building in Sapporo's Susukino entertainment district. To walk in is to step back in time 40 or 50 years to the peak of Japan's economic boom. Their 100 year old barman recently died, but his vision – an earth-toned wonderland of tartan-vested bartenders, red carpets and high-backed stools in matching red leather, wood paneling and ornate hanging lamps, remains unchanged. Of the drinks that won international competitions in 1976 and 1981, with names like the “Polestar Twinkle,” with unfashionable vodka-amaretto bases and green Maraschino cherries as garnishes (ever even seen one of those before outside a fruitcake?), with black-and-white photos of the awards presented by men in combovers at Geneva lakeside hotels. In what universe is the Balalaika or the Valencia or the Silent Third a “classic cocktail,” as the menu would have it? And the bottles of cordials behind the bar, do they even make these anymore? The labels certainly haven't changed, for Cheritier-Guyot Kummel, Mazarine Creme de Cassis, Vosges Anisette – memories of staring at the bottom shelf at the liquor store as a small-child, the ugly Victorian-font labels on plastic bottles of blackberry brandy and sloe gin seeming to indicate the pathway to an adult world... as would be that promotional clock from the '70s, topped with a brass statuette of a kilted Scottish clan warrior, tucked in neatly beside the SoCo.

In the 1970s, before making his genre-defiling masterpiece Hausu, Nobuhiko Obayashi rose to fame as a director of high-concept advertisements. This bar in Sapporo reminded me of nothing as much as this:

 

 Yes, Charles Bronson tuxedo'd in a lowlit piano bar before cruising home to smoke a pipe shirtless and douse himself in Mandom – incidentally a product I used after a bath in the Noboribetsu Onsen the next day, all the while whistling the theme song, “Otoko No Sekai,” or in its international version “Lovers of the World.” The audio version of a shag-carpeted conversation pit.

But in Hokkaido, everything is even more a terraform than in other parts of Japan.

This is the final surviving push of Japanese imperial might after the Meiji Restoration. When, with guidance from the stern and muttonchopped New England missionaries who built Sapporo's Odori Park and the clock tower with its small-paned Puritan windows, as defenseless against the Arctic winds as in the farmhouses of Massachusetts. Dreaming of imperial glory, the Meiji state pushed into what were deemed virgin lands, beyond the outpost of ethnic Japanese around Hakodate, at the southernmost tip of Hokkaido.

“Boys, be ambitious!” commanded William Smith Clark, founder of the Sapporo Agricultural College, and a well-known figure in Japan to this day.

And that ambition came in the form of the same tactics that were still then being used against the Plains Indians were used against the Ainu in an attempt to push the Japanese nation northward, with land cleared for crops, with methods of hunting salmon and deer restricted or downright made illegal, with an agenda of forced assimilation.

I stare out from my seat on the train at the meadows, the sea, the snow-streaked mountain cols, the smoking volcanoes.

At the end of the day, history is the same series of echoes and reflections – only the walls of the mirror maze differ.

One I find to be a charming piece of kitsch. The other an unspeakable grotesque.

Reference Desk

I've frequently heard – both as a neutral comment and as an active complaint – that my writing is overstuffed with references. A forgotten European battle here, a disco single there, a torrent of names and places and times.

I sometimes wonder why this is. Is it laziness? A failure to develop the subtleties of narrative? Is it a symptom of late-stage capitalism, a cheap Bret Easton Ellis (there I go again...) move in which name brands are substituted for humanity?

No, at least I don't think so. Because so many of the artists and thinkers I love build on references, and it's not because they are lazy, or because they are passive victims of the “postmodern condition,” forced to rely on “intertextual” technique. And in fact we should ask where the line is drawn, or if any line can be drawn between “reference” and mundane metaphor and analogy.

I'm sure there are linguists, philosophers, and others more competent and qualified than myself having this discussion right now. I'll leave well-enough alone for the time being, mere mook that I am.

But whatever it is – reference, metaphor, analogy – has always been an endless fascination. The histories and geographies of the objects of our daily life, the encoded sign systems we barely notice. And I've always been drawn to those who see the world in a similar light.

We'll start with W.G. Sebald in Austerlitz...

 “If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleared up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who had been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, and avenue or a bridge.”

Gorgeous, no? Bonus points if you get the reference...

“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new
houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, whose work I tried in my own way to reference before I ever read Austerlitz, before I realized that Sebald way-more-than-one-upped me

But it's not just a figurine in the galette des rois, waiting to be found. At it's best it's an invitation into a world. And so it was I looked for those artists and thinkers who seemed, in their odd way, to be writing such letters requesting your presence in their worlds.

When I was 15 or 16 and I read Joan Didion for the time, I understood damn near nothing. I couldn't understand the objects lingered over – the plumeria blossoms and stray pieces of tulle and Bob Dylan 7” singles, the bourbon flasks and white lipstick. I didn't know anything about the tabloid headlines of the day, anything about ritualized screaming in Synanon or the '64 Goldwater campaign or the coded references to events that occurred on Cielo Drive. And yet somehow... they cohered.

There is always the risk that when a references fails to resonate with the reader, that the reader is alienated. And yet somehow – and maybe this is my adolescent lack of confidence speaking – I was drawn in. It didn't seem unknowable. Rather, it seemed like a skeleton key to a lost world, the sort of world where you might spend the early evening among wealthy Republicans who still saw heavy silken drapes as good taste of the sort that had been lost during the French Revolution, and the late evening splitting an eight-ball with Lindsey Buckingham.

But this has been such a repeated pattern in what I find appealing. And furthermore, the world I discovered inside the text bleeds over into the outside world.

Which is why I walk around, seeing the Tom Waits rain falling into a brand of shoes American-made until 1983, hearing the Mark Fisher bass rhythm in an after-hours club. Having a Robert Coover fever dream at 2:30 in the morning, imagining I am hearing Walter Benjamin sigh on a gray autumn day.

But this is where the breadcrumb trail leads. The city of streets and squares, nooks and crannies outside my window, the plumerias in bloom across the pool.