Another one of Mr Sakamoto in his prime, Nippon Budokan 1992.

Walking home from Bangi Station this afternoon, as we rounded one of the nearby apartment blocks to the Choi's, there was a crack of wood breaking up ahead. To me it sounded like an electrical crack, a main shorting out. The girl just ahead of us stopped. She turned, saw me and asked "Was that a person?" - I made a face as if to say "I doubt it" and kept moving. Ji-Young urged us to stop but we kept going and as we got closer I saw the branch of the tree was snapped, hanging loose like a broken limb. In the garden bed below was a body. My immediate thought was to stop, that a cleaner or maintenance person had fallen from the roof and they were definitely dead. We got closer, we saw it was a girl with branches tangled over her and lying, leg cocked up, in the slightly muddy earth of the apartment garden. I turned, ran back and said "call an ambulance." Ji-Young and the stranger stood back, 20 metres or so, frightened to come nearer.

I ran back - the girl looked dead. I didn't know how far she had fallen, or what she had landed on. She was just a heap of limbs and flesh lying there. Dai and I shed our jackets - she was wearing only black tights, colourful socks,  and a nectarine-coloured blouse. She still had a pair of glasses on her head. Her eyes were rolled right back and her face was pale.

Not knowing what to do, Dai knelt down to hold her hand and I called for blankets. We checked, she was still breathing, her chest visibly rising and falling under our jackets laid over her near-lifeless silhouette. She lay there for a while, not moving and her face slowly going paler and paler. Eventually her eyes opened, they moved. By now we'd stripped to our t-shirts, all our layers over her. Nobody brought blankets. Some passers-by stopped, others looked and moved on. Still nobody brought blankets. A police car eventually arrived, the officer didn't touch her but took photos and asked her some questions - "Did you fall?" "Were you home alone?" She murmured some answers, barely audible. An ambulance came soon after, maybe five minutes. The paramedics checked her first, a pulse, waking her up. They got a stretcher and with some difficulty the three of us - medic, Dai and I got her onto it. The medic forcefully put her on, tying the straps over her and trying to force her leg around to fit onto the stretcher. She didn't move or protest the whole time.

I found myself trying to find anything to do. Throughout this whole event I felt so helpless, unable to do anything.

They took her into the back of the ambulance, just as I think her mother showed up. Instantly the mother was all noise and tears, holding her daughters' hand and wailing as they took her daughter away.

Dai says he has her eyes as they opened in his head. I have the crack of the wood, and I can still see the criss-cross of dirt, scratches and stretch marks over the girl's hip, both burnt into my brain.

I don't know why she did it or what has happened, whether she lived, or is injured, broken limbs, internal injuries or paraplegia, or if she's fine. I don't know what circumstances she was in or under, but it seemed like she timed her "jump" to coincide with her mother getting back from work - seemingly and chillingly so her mother would find her dead daughter. Ji-Young suggested it was because she had a bad family life or something about her family forced her to do it. In any case she seemed unprepared. The glasses still on her head said a bit.
She was lucky? Is lucky even correct in these circumstances? That she hit the branch to slow her fall, and that the ground was recently snowy and damp and this absorbed her weight as she hit the ground. The crater she left was about 10 centimetres deep.

There was something still so shockingly final and unpreventable about her act. I was reminded of a Sam Harris quote I was reading just a few days ago on the way into Korea.

"We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. The world sustains us, it would seem, only to devour us at its leisure. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the  last time. This life, when viewed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss."

We have to be insulted and outraged every day by what we see and what we read. By slaughter and murder, slaughter and murder, and barbarism and insult and superstitious nonsense - we do not reply in kind - we don't say, "We'll go and kill you if you're going to insult us like this." Do we get no credit for saying this? When has anyone ever said “What's it like to be insulted as someone thinks that civilization is a real thing?” Why is it always interfaith, why is it always interdenominational? Why can't we say that all of these cults are equal and equivalent glimpses of the untrue?

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."