I've realised I'm very capable of keeping many different sets of books.

It's always struck me as ironic that when people say they love the smell of rain, what they're really smelling is the odour of dirt and the compiled general crap of the world that's settled on the ground. After all, water is odourless - the scent is just the scent of that dirt being mixed with water that's evaporating as it hits the warm earth.

Nice Ink!

"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more, but I want nothing more." - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There's moments where the blood just drops out of your heart.

You actually feel inadequate because you can sense how much pain someone else is in, but you can't relate, you can't be them and you certainly can't take it all away.

Jukai

Aokigahara - suicide forest.

I really appreciate how matter of fact the geologist is. It's a strange question, too - why do you suicide in such a beautiful place?

I find it interesting too that the social circumstances I have experienced to a degree in Japan that Japanese themselves find stifling I found refreshing next to my experience of Australia. Maybe I don't understand it enough, or can't experience it to the same degree.

"I really think it is time we admitted that faith is really the permission that religious people give each other to believe things strongly when reasons fail.

...And I think that the real irony here that we need to point out relentlessly is that every religious person recognises this fact with respect to the other guys' religion."

Sam Harris

Sakamoto

Even though I think this a poor representation of the recorded version (much too jazzy);
what a cool guy.

 

As far as I’ve seen from the bush
In the wilderness, to every known city
I’ve been to Saudi Arabia, Dhaka, Calcutta
Soweto, Mozambique, Istanbul, Rio, Rome
Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Taiwan, Great Britain
Belfast, to the desert, Spain, Tokyo
Some little bitty island in the middle of the Pacific
All the way back home, to my town
To my town

Black Rain

Finally got around to watching this movie, my dad's been telling me to watch it for years; I've pretty much grown up with some knowledge of the soundtrack.

I really enjoyed the way a particular feeling of the environ the characters inhabit and the way they portrayed Osaka, all fuzzy neon glow through haze and rain. 

I didn't enjoy how dark in terms of visibility the whole movie was; or how hard the speech was to understand to the extent I missed parts of the plot development. 

The music, it speaks for itself, and the whole movie. (below)

Boundlessness

    

Maple and cedar, seeds on the wind.

Shinpai shinaide kudasai

心配しないでください。

Gianluigi's Buffon's singing was mentioned as one of the top sights of Euro 2012.

This is the best video of Gigi Buffon's anthem singing I could find. I think you get the idea.

The man himself says here:

“It’s true, I get very emotional during the national anthem before games. This national team means a lot to me, an awful lot.

“Italy is my country, where I was born, and that makes me very proud. I lost two great-grandparents in the war and the way I act is a sign of the recognition I have for them and how much they still meant to me.”

This is a feeling I can actually relate to, seemingly needlessly nationalistic as it is. I've always felt it, ever since I understood from the earliest ANZAC Day service what war and death and sacrifice was, and learning that I had ancestors that were part of it.

My paternal great-grandfather, Mervyn Lemaistre Wilson, fought in Belgium and I believe at Polygon Wood; and was, from my estimation from his records, hospitalised three times for lung infections and was also shot in the leg, to return eventually to Australia. My father recalls, when he dared to ask about his wartime experience, that my grandfather's summation was that he lived for three weeks thigh-deep in mud and subsisting on only stale jam sandwiches.

As I understand, my maternal great-grandfather, Edgar Percy Leheup, fought too in Belgium, possibly nearby to his Australian counterpart. An officer, he was awarded the Military Cross, the second highest award for valour as can be given by the British Empire. He was also gassed. He died in peacetime, I only found out a week ago, as a result of pneumonia brought on by lung damage. He died when my grandmother was two. She knows him only by photos.

Even though I never met these men, I do have a deep respect for them. War, as has been said before is not to be glorified, and I don't seek to do that. But I think both Gigi and myself are justifiably proud of the sacrifices these particular men made in times of uncontemplatable waste of life and a scale of slaughter not seen in the world to that point.

The Curse of Comfort

My home, as partly seen from Waverton.

I've been thinking lately about how much I want to travel and how I want to see (and more richly, experience) other places. But I think too about how much similarly people in other countries must view Australia - on this note I was talking to my brother when I saw him on the weekend (he who has been to pretty much all of Europe) and how we share that desire to be somewhere, anywhere else but here. He was the one that raised the point: "Yeah, Ror, but those Londoners or Europeans might see exactly the same about Australia, and how extraordinary we are."

The thing is, these things are relative. The grass is always greener on the other side (*of the world). I've been thinking about Tokyo and Kyoto; and Berlin and Paris and Seoul.
I think too about how Sydney seems uninteresting and ordinary. I've come to see that this is part of the process of how we come to form our perception of "home".

In marketing recently I've learnt a bit about the sensory process and how stimulus salience and exposure is important. Basically, the process of perception goes like this. We are exposed to a stimuli; we pay attention to it because it is salient; we interpret it; and then we integrate that into our perception and experience of the world. Basically, there's the net result in there that the more exposure we have to a given stimuli, or the more repeated or "noisy" that stimuli is, the more we come to perceive that as less important or powerful.

So, to call somewhere home is to, I guess, have experienced the stimuli so much it is all at once comfortable, it is noisy, it is unimportant. This stimuli could be the sight of open blue skies for 3 weeks straight, for the glint of the vista of endless glass that is Sydney Harbour, for a perfect temperate autumn day. It could be knowing your suburb so intimately so that you can walk home blind. It could be knowing the way the wind blows in city streets. It could be knowing the best place to buy coffee, or a croissant, or the way the street feels on a Sunday. However the sting of comfort is boredom. Without salience, these stimuli aren't impactful, they aren't knocking at the doors of your consciousness, of your sensory experiences.  As The Thrills sing, "the curse of comfort has plagued your artistic life".

That's why I can walk around Ikebukuro, or Kurama, or Gion, and respectively be buffeted by a constant stream of humanity; see millions of leaves of subtle shades foresting the mountains; walk amongst the miyachi and imagine myself centuries years back in time - and all the time be captivated. Similarly I could walk around Copenhagen, or Berlin, or Paris and all these would be exciting, captivating and each day would go into my memory bank inconceivably more powerful than the day I went to uni or the day I went to the city to buy a CD.  There's simple psychological reasons why we feel the way we do about the places we encounter, and why we can remember such strong details of those places we hold close to our heart.

I guess these powerful feelings for the unfamiliar overweigh the familiar stimuli from the world that are just as beautiful and captivating.

With the conversation that I had with my brother, my perception has changed so slightly. Walking around North Sydney, Kirribilli, Waverton and those surrounding areas of a warm winter afternoon too has hit me harder than I thought they would. My extended family asking me why I liked Sydney and how it was better than Brisbane; and particularly a short walk around Ashgrove and a drive through Red Hill opened my eyes a bit to things that can lie under our attention if we don't seek them. I guess I hope I can see lots of Sydney soon that is new to me, that is not yet familiar, mundane, home. I know Sydney has places hidden still to me.

I do not think I'll ever not want to travel, at least at worst, periodically. But we can't do this constantly, not unless we are dealt a hand by fate that is so complimentary! So on that note, I hope to at minimum, drain a constant appreciation for that place I have no choice to know as home as best I can. The grass is greenest wherever watered and fed by unfamiliarity. We can still grow a pretty nice patch in our own backyard, though.

Yech "How I feel now"

Seekae's new one in perhaps the best Opera House in the world?

"We don't want people to live without wonder or mystery, and in fact we thoroughly recommend - take a look through the Hubble telescope, see if you can get over what you see. The unbelievable beauty and symmetry and majesty of what you'll see, and you want to exchange this for the burning bush? I don't think you will.
Read a page of Stephen Hawking, on the event horizon, for example, and see if that isn't awe-inspiring enough for anybody. And you're seeing there the future of a potentially much more noble, and ennobled and enlightened and emancipated humanity...."

Alright then, because it might make us feel better, let's pretend the opposite. Instead you'll get tapped on the shoulder and told "Great news! This party's going on forever, and you can't leave. You've got to stay! The boss says so, and he also insists that you have a good time."

It will happen to all of us that at some point you'll get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party's over, but slightly worse - the party's going on but you have to leave, and it's going on without you. That's the reflection I think that most upsets people about their demise.

New Art

Study Setup

Memories of Tokyo, and wanting to return.

The Spinocylinder

Don't mistake wanting to get to know you for wanting to get to know of you.

...there is no all-seeing, all-loving god who keeps us safe from harm. But atheism is not an invitation to despair. By disclaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement from this one. The here and now is not something to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it. So, atheism is life-affirming in a way religion can never be.

Look around you. Nature demands our attention, begs us to explore, to question. Religion can provide only facile, ultimately unsatisfying answers. Science, in constantly seeking real explanations, reveals the true majesty of our world in all its complexity. People sometimes say "there must be more than just this world, than just this life." But how much more do you want?

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permutated, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here, the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive, and we should make the most of our time on this world.

Being paranoid about life and events is the worst.
Overthinking leads you that way.

Travelling is a great part of life because of the common experience it engenders amongst people. There's a subtle and unexplainable change that comes over a traveller. It opens horizons, and makes relationships seem more genuine, maybe because they're less tenable and more impermanent. Knowing you won't know a person for long makes a short encounter all the more powerful. I try to treasure particularly the people themselves I meet over the sights. People make the experience before the environment, in many ways.
The people I travelled with I feel I have some kind of long term and lasting experience in common. We all know where we were, at that particular point in our lives, and what it meant.
It's also why I believe travelling when you're not self sufficient limits the experience. Relying on your parents puts a barrier between you, what you want to do and the people you'll meet.

Japan 16th-18th

Tokyo University, again.

The University's main square by night, blurry.

Kimono Market, near Harajuku Metro (I think)

The craziest kimonos in the store.

Boxes of obi.

Roving Christmas celebrators asked me for a photo.

Shinjuku somewhere.

Cocoon Tower.

Doing my best Karim Rashid impersonation, Takeshita Street.