EARTHLINGZ KOUYOU GATHERING 2022

 

 @ THE SILKHOUSE, CHICHIBU

2年間 EarthlingZ Gatheringは開催されませんでしたが今年の11 月 25～27日に2 年間 EarthlingZ Gatheringは開催されませんでしたが今年の11 月 25～27日に開催したいと思います。参加してお手伝いやパフォーマンスができる方は、参加可能の日程をお知らせください。 出席できない場合は、チェックボックスにその旨を記入してください。 すでに私と内密に確認している場合でも、Doodle への参加を入力してください。そうすることでほかの方もそれを確認することができます。ギャザリングの開催時間は25日午後から27日午後までですが、前 日までに準備を手伝っていただける方がいらっしゃいましたら、個人的にお知らせください。 皆様に会えるのを楽しみにしています。 https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/bYvk3rAd After two years without any EarthlingZ Gatherings, we are finally able to plan the Koyo Gathering, to be held on 25-27 November. If you think you may be able to attend and help or perform, please indicate the dates that you think will be possible for you. Even if you have already confirmed to me privately, it would help to encourage others to have your entry in the Doodle. The main times of the Gathering will be from the afternoon of the 25th to the afternoon of the 27th, but if you can volunteer to help with preparations in the preceding days, please include those dates or inform me privately. Hope to see you there!

KENJI SAKASEGAWA /   TABLA

YUICHI SEKIGUCHI /  SAROD

IZUMI KURIBAYASHI /  VIOLIN

NOBOYUKI KATO   GUITAR

DRMU /  BASS GUITAR

JOOST & MIRI /  VARIOUS

MASAKO /  KORA

ED DURBROW /  GUITAR, LUTE

MIKU  /  DJ

MIURA /  DRUMS (tbd)

KAYOKO /  DANCE

L EIYA DANSE /  DANSE

ACCESS and CONTACT INFO

COSTS: チ ケット＆宿泊： １０００円  食べ物＆飲み物 は入場時に購入するアース リングスのお金を利用し買うことがで きます。晩ご飯と朝ご飯をカバーできるように最低限2５００ 円分のアース リングスのお金を購入することをおすすめします。  Party and Accommodation  1000 円  Food and Drinks:.

このイベントをサポートするために食事と飲み物を販売していますので、食 べ物と飲み物の持ち込みをしないで下さい。その他、お酒や薬物の使用はグリーンハ ウスで禁止されていますので、ご注意下さい。    Please do not bring your own food and beverages, as it is  the sale of these that supports these events. Please note also that alcohol and stimulant drugs are not allowed at The Greenhouse.

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VERSES OF THE DAY

"Many Happy Returns"

-W.H.AUDEN-

Johnny, since to-day is

February the twelfth when

neighbors and relations

think of you and wish,

though a staunch Aquarian,

graciously accept the

verbal celebrations

of a doubtful fish.

seven years ago you

warmed your mother's heart by

making a successful

debut on our stage;

naivete's an act that

you already know you

cannot get away with

even at your age.

so I wish you first a

sense of theatre; only

those who love illusion

and know it will go far:

otherwise we spend our

lives in a confusion

of what we say and do with

who we really are.

you will any day now

have this revelation:

"why, we're all like people

acting in a play."

and will suffer, Johnny,

man's unique temptation

precisely at the moment

you utter this cliche.

remember if you can then,

only the All-Father

can change the cast or give them

easier lines to say;

deliberate interference

with others for their own good

is not allowed the author

of the play within The Play.

just because our pride's an

evil there's no end to,

birthdays and the arts are

justified, for when

we consciously pretend to

own the earth or play at

being gods, thereby we

own that we are men.

as a human creature

you will all too often

forget your proper station,

Johnny, like us all;

therefore let your birthday

be a wild occasion like a Saturnalia

or a Servant's Ball.

what else shall I wish you?

following convention

shall i wish you Beauty,

Money, Happiness?

or anything you mention?

no, for I recall an

ancient proverb--nothing

fails like a success.

what limping devil sets our

head and heart at variance,

that each time the Younger

Generation sails,

the old and weather-beaten

deny their own experience

and pray the gods to send them

calm seas, auspicious gales?

I'm not such an idiot

as to claim the power

to peer into the vistas

of your future, still

I'm prepared to guess you

have not found your life as

easy as your sister's

and you never will.

if I'm right about this,

may you in your troubles,

neither (like so many

in the U.S.A.)

be ashamed of any

suffering as vulgar,

nor bear them like a hero

in the biggest way.

all the possibilities

it had to reject are

what give life and warmth to

an actual character;

the roots of wit and charm tap

secret springs of sorrow,

every brilliant doctor

hides a murderer.

then, since all self-knowledge

tempts man into envy,

may you, by acquiring

proficiency in what

Whitehead calls the art of

Negative Prehension,

love without desiring

all that you are not.

Tao is a tightrope,

so to keep your balance,

may you always, Johnny,

manage to combine

intellectual talents

with a sensual gusto,

the Socratic Doubt with

the Socratic Sign.

that is all I can

think of at this moment

and it's time I brought these

verses to a close:

Happy Birthday, Johnny,

live beyond your income,

travel for enjoyment,

follow your own nose. 

EQUINOCTURNE

EQUINOCTURNE Had I not stopped attempting poetry 40 years ago, I might have done better with these musings, but please be tolerant. They are, at least, reasonably iambic. EQUINOCTURNE Coquettish Spring, elusive, virginal Brushes the chill of March with wisps of warmth, While brother Winter's valedictory Breaths, the harukaze, sternly greet Plum blossoms and incautious daffodils. The days grow longer, and with now in sight The Equinox of spring, the Light and Dark In perfect balance, even-handedly, The Yin and Yang co-equal, as we're told In all phenomena they tend to be, Blind to this equanimity though we are. Depending on the region you call home, It may not seem the earth is heating up; The melting glaciers paradoxically Provoke the startling blizzards unforeseen. Has nature's balance truly been upset-- "Koyannisqatsi" as the Hopis say-- Or do the new locales for droughts and floods Bespeak a larger kind of harmony Indifferent to our fleeting destiny? Whatever on the planetary scale May balance out, I can't avoid the thought That in the weather of the human heart A new ice age approaches, even where The temperatures are highest and, in thrall To atavistic ideologies, Men drive compassion from their freezing hearts And sink to medieval cruelty. The poet Robert Frost may be the one Who said it best: "Some say the world Will end in fire; some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great, and would suffice." We may not hold apocalyptic views, Nor eagerly or nervously await The end of days, but harder to deny Is something I am tempted to describe As Thanatotropism, or at least A fashion for acceptance of decline In standards of the bodies politic And spiritual alike -- for which I see No antidote but Auden's "affirming flame".

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In my first few years in Japan, I spent most of the time apart from in the winters, travelling the length and breadth of the country by motorcycle, living in a tent in the forests, taking photographs and writing poetry.  My girlfriend at the time was Fukiko Hayamizu, who translated them for me  and did the Japanese calligraphy for the poems collected below.  Her translations were so good and idiomatic that many Japanese assumed they were the originals and that the English versions were translations of them, whereas the reverse was of course the case.

Remembering Jeffrey Tate

In my first year at Cambridge there was a small group of friends, all fellow members of Christ's College, who met together most evenings and many afternoons for endless conversation. What we all had in common was a great appreciation of classical music, theatre and of wit. Jeffrey was a powerhouse of all these. His physical affliction ruled out most roles in drama, but his direction/production of Measure For Measure for the ADC (or Mummers? or Marlowe Society?) left an indelible impression on me.

In those days, despite never having had any piano lessons, I was trying to teach myself to play Bach.The second piece I learned was Var.13 of the Goldberg Variations. It took me two years. I used to practice it in a little back room at Christ's One day Jeffrey popped in to see what I was doing.

"Do you play?" I asked.
"A little," said he.
"Please show me how this should go"

Whereupon he sat down and played it so well that I asked him to start from the beginning, and marveled as he sightread the entire Goldberg Variations, his performance being as good as any I had heard. I knew he loved music and was in the college choir, but he was studying medicine, so it was quite a surprise. But in fact, after doing his medical internship, he got a position as a repetiteur for Georg Solti at Covent Garden, and went on to become principal conductor at Covent Garden, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic.and others.

I lost touch with him when I left England for India and, eventually, Japan, but he got in touch when he came to Tokyo for some concerts with the pianist Mitsuko Uchida, and my wife and daughter and I attended the concert and spent the rest of the day with the two of them; he was as fun to talk with as ever,and we were able to catch up a bit on what had become of all the members of our little clique.

Although people with his condition normally have a short life expectancy, this didn't seem to apply to Jeffrey. You may have noticed that conductors generally live to a very advanced age, often doing their best work in their final decades. I don't for a moment doubt that allowing music to flow continually through your mind and body is the closest thing to the Elixir Of Youth available And also, as Jeffrey said,

""There is in the last resort no limit to my physical energy if I know what I'm doing and want to do it."

An introduction to EarthlingZ, the creative community that has grown up around the site in the mountains where my wife Futaba and I settled a few decades ago:

GreetingZ, EarthlingZ!

Most of you know about and many of you have visited The
Greenhouse and Silkhouse , which constitute the physical
basecamp of EarthlingZ in the mountains of Chichibu. It
is a couple of old farmhouses which we have turned into a
place catering to the creative and nature-oriented people
we have come to know through our own activities,
especially those working in the fields of music, dance,
graphics, the healing arts, and the spiritual sciences.

Of course there are countless such people, especially in
and around Tokyo, but our location and the values we
encourage has meant that only those who have discovered
the importance to their creativity of connecting with the
infinite energies of organic Nature will make the effort
to return again and again.

There is very little in urban life today that brings to
our attention our place in the cosmos, or even reminds us
that we are on an actual planet. From the moment we leave
our rooms in the morning we are moving through a creation
of human engineering, a giant warehouse and database
which we navigate in as straight lines as we can towards
destinations determined largely by our material agendas.

We rarely look up, knowing that there will be no stars
visible, and that what's happening in the sky makes
little difference to our work and movements. Even as we
sleep we are bathed in the discordant electromagnetic and
psychic vibrations of the physical and mental activities
of millions, but hardly understand the tensions and
levels of egotism this creates.

If we step out of this and into the real life of the
planet, we find our oppressive sense of separate selfhood
dissolve as we walk through the cool cathedrals of the
cedars, watch the wind ripple over the ricefields, or
hear the voices of birds and animals punctuate the
stillness of the glittering night.

In such an atmosphere, we need no guidance, no teachers
or gurus, to bring us to considering our condition as
humans on the earth. We move without effort towards
wider perspectives, consider our pasts and futures with
at least temporary detachment, and recharge our spiritual
batteries through grounding to the earth while attending
to the heights.

This often leads us to make music, to dance, to centre in
the Here and Now, to show each other the wonders we
discover in so doing, and to rediscover what marvellous
creatures human beings are when they are really Present
and open to each other and their environment.

It was once said by Terence McKenna that "Nature is the
great teacher of metaphysics". People who like to learn
this way we call EarthlingZ, and all the facilities we
have developed here are meant to make this easier.

Memories of Nigel and Jenny

A writer named Ingrid Maclean is writing a book about the psychedelic revolution in London in the 1960s, of which a large part will be the story of the adventures of my good friend Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, and I was asked to contribute some reminiscences,. I procrastinated until the deadline was upon me, and quickly penned this the other evening. 

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By the time I went to Cambridge to study philosophy, I had been devoted to literature for years, and even intended to be a writer, having been producing poetry since I was 13. It was in literature, of all the creative arts, that I sought to learn about human nature and existence. I had thought that the study of philosophy would amount to considering such matters at an even higher level than poetry, but I had the misfortune to be at university in a period when British philosophy was dominated by logical positivism, which rejected all metaphysical notions as well as existentialism ("continental claptrap", opined my director of studies.)

Disillusioned with the courses and lecturers, I found myself devoting much more time and attention to drama, which at least seemed to be concerned with The Meaning Of Life. But I soon came to find the theatre world at Cambridge to be much more petty and cliquey than suited me. I had previously in London been involved with the Hampstead bohemian set, and came to know similar people in Cambridge, some of whom lived in a house in Clarendon St. owned by a recent graduate, Bill Barlow.

It was in a conversation with Bill that he made what seemed to me the radical assertion that my goal of being a creative person was not necessarily the most admirable path. Rather, he insisted, the elevation of consciousness was the greater priority. After all, the quality of one's creative work is bound to be a direct result of one's consciousness, and the most important criterion of its value was surely its effect on the consciousness of others as well.

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon at that time was living at Clarendon St., and I soon realised that he was already of that persuasion, and it was from him that I learned about such authors as Ouspensky, whose Meetings With Remarkable Men and Tertium Organum were fundamental texts for the expanded consciousness movement, as well as Gurdjieff and R.D. Laing, who was making waves with his novel ideas about altered mental states. Nigel was quite familiar with the beatniks, and introduced me to many of their writings. I soon was spending more time at Clarendon St. than with my fellow students, delighting in conversation with Nigel and his lovely girlfriend,later wife, Jenny.

At about the same time that I left the university in 1965, Nigel and Jenny moved to an apartment in London, also owned by Bill Barlow, at 101 Cromwell Road. Once again I was drawn to their company time and again, and after living for a few months in Marylebone, I moved in to the room next door to theirs. Thus began the most intensely transformative period of my life to date. It's hard to believe that it really only spanned about three years, so full of experience and realisations was it. The history of 101 is well-known; the myriad of underground writers, artists, musicians and psychonauts who frequented the place has become legendary. Nigel was the most congenial of hosts, and Jenny brought a cleverly mischievous charm to all occasions, and there was hardly an evening when there were not several or many visitors, quite often enjoying the LSD that arrived there via Michael Hollingshead and John Esam before it was known at all in London.

Many histories of the 60s present the 101 scene as if it revolved around Syd Barrett of the Pink Floyd, who lived there at various periods, and perpetuate the perspective typical of journalists and fans, namely that the most famous person in a group is the centre of it, implying that the people sharing space with him at 101 Cromwell Road and later at Egerton Court were "camp-followers" or "hangers-on." Nothing could be farther from the truth. Just about everybody there had his own thing; most were there before he came, and some of them were his childhood friends. The creative atmosphere owed less to him than to such residents as Nigel, poet John Esam (who co-organised the Albert Hall Poetry Festival), photographer Dave Larcher, graphic artists Storm Thorgerson and and the others who formed Hipgnosis, visual artist David Gale (Lumiere & Son), poet-author of The Book of Grass George Andrews, budding alchemist Stash Klossowski de Rola, etc., etc. Other visitors to 101 included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Kenneth Anger, Donovan, Marianne Faithfull, Alex Trocchi, and various Stones and Beatles. A much longer list could be made, but the point is that Syd was there because it was a matrix from which sprang the 60s London psychedelia. Of course, in addition to the psychonauts there were people who came merely because it was a Scene, people stuck at the level of personalities. Interestingly enough, many of these are the ones most eager to be interviewed about the carryings-on there, and their accounts often miss the essence as much as they themselves missed the point then through their exclusive focus on personalities.

At that time I was working as assistant to Robert Fraser (Groovy Bob) at his gallery in Duke St., which became one of the principal nodes of Swinging London. Through Fraser I met and became good friends with Christopher Gibbs, the two of them being central figures in a bohemian aristocrat set to which several Rolling Stones and Beatles were also attracted. I introduced Nigel to these people, and he and Jenny were immediately accepted with great enthusiasm. After all, few couples merited the term "The Beautiful People" as much as they did, and many of these privileged people and celebrities were becoming turned on to acid and welcomed the transcendental perspective that we sought to share, which interpreted the psychedelic experience as cognate to the experiences of mystics and occultists.

At that time there were basically two schools of thought about how LSD was best taken, which one might call the Leary school and the Kesey school. The latter, with its extroverted antics and missionary zeal, is well described in Tom Wolfe's Electric Koolaid Acid Test. The Leary/Alpert approach was based on eastern spirituality, though no less proselytising. Nigel, like most of us, was of that leaning, and our explorations of Buddhism, Taoism, Jung's writings and many other esoteric works gradually led many of us to a search for the ideal method of attaining what we were still bold enough to call Enlightenment.

It was in the company of Nigel and Jenny that my transition to vegetarianism began. While full-on tripping,we went to a restaurant and ordered a meal. When it came, I stared at my veal escalope in horror, muttering "Baby calf flesh", while Jenny gazed in dismay at her omelette. "Baby chickens,", I believe she whimpered. I can't remember what Nigel had ordered, but that experience pretty much converted me to a vegetarian diet. It was at another restaurant meal, incidentally, that I placed in a moment of verbal ineptitude an order for "a glass of two milks", a phrase that will live in infamy, now that Nigel has used it as the title of one of his recent novels.

It was from Nigel that I first learned about a Master in India who seemed to have all the qualities of a true master, as distinct from the many questionable gurus who appear in profusion, levitating, collecting Rolls Royces and materialising watches, etc. Several friends had been to his ashram, or Dera as it was called, and came back with glowing testimony to his being The Real Thing. It was not long, therefore, before Nigel and Jenny, myself and Adrian Haggard obtained permission to attend the Radha Soami Satsang in Beas, Punjab. Adrian and I set out to hitchhike to the Punjab, which was an adventure in itself, and we met up with Nigel and Jenny there. Over the next few weeks we experienced the amazing aura and wisdom of the master, Charan Singh, and as our stay there ended, we all received initiation into the practice of Shabad Yoga, the yoga of internal sound. Without doubt this has proven the most significant turning point in all our lives.

Nigel and Jenny returned to England, and I headed east, hitchhiking and working my way on ships until I reached Japan, where I have been pretty much ever since. We've got together several times over the years, in England and in India, and they remain among the most loved people in my life, true spiritual colleagues. Many of my best memories are of things said or written or otherwise learned from or together with them. If any one thing epitomises the shared vision we had from the start of what we might become, it is probably a Chinese poem Nigel had written out and pinned to his wall, which seemed to sum up the ultimate goal as not at all the gravitas of Enlightenment, but the shared delight of heightened awareness.

"When two masters meet
They laugh and laugh--
The trees, the many fallen leaves."

To Write Or Not To Write?

I have often contemplated, and even been urged, to write an autobiography, but have consistently postponed it until such time as I can't do much else, such as when my emphysema will reach a point where I sit around and search the web for cheap oxygen canisters.

But it's more than that. It seems to me that to be worth foisting onto other people with a "Please read and review this". it would have to be more than a sequence of anecdotes and name droppings. It would have to approximate the concept of Bildungs Roman, of which the novels of Hermann Hesse are a clear example; a tale of the gradually evolving consciousness of a person. Anecdotes would have to mark moments of realisation, not necessarily entheogenic, but of the nature of humans and the general question of WTFIGO. But I suspect that I'm not interesting enough as a character or mind for the story of How I Became What I Am to be worth the effort, especially as age tends to bring with it the realisation not only that "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity", but that Life Is Not A Story, and that casting it in the form of one ensures that, as Glenn Gould said or implied, autobiography is definitely a subgenre of imaginative fiction, placing in mind-created timespace what really takes place in an eternal Now. I would be inclined to balance that by showing some continuity between the various disillusionments that determined changes in direction and perspective, featuring the recurrent (and to me welcome) realisation that everything I hitherto believed was wrong (or should I say "wrnog"?).

It could be entertaining if I described some of my Meetings With Remarkable People or friendships with celebrities and the rich, but mainly in how for the most part such experiences cured me of interest in fame, fortune and ambition. I fear it might be something of a downer for the reader, though, as I would have to chronicle how an entire generation in America and parts of Europe felt like outsiders in the 60s and created the so-called counterculture, with the vast majority of them gradually morphing into the Me Generation, learning to mock people such as myself, who don't see it as moving on from naive idealism to Being Realistic to hold, for example, that it actually makes more sense even from a hardcore empirical perspective to hug a tree than to cut it down for garden furniture or artisanal firewood. ( I recall in childhood being repelled by watching fish die in the bottom of the boat, and feeling something was wrong when I learned that my uncle's waterskis, which I so enjoyed using on Lake Winnepesaukee, were made from a giant redwood. (It's probably good to get an early start to accepting you're a weirdo.))

Writing an autobiography would, of course, provide ample excuse for the type of rambling you see above, and would doubtless lead to vast swathes of nested parentheses....

Syd Barrett and 101 Cromwell Road

12 June 2012

I had forgotten about this posting I made in 2002 to the 604 mailing list in response to one Clayton Hill's comments on an article in the Guardian about Syd Barrett, but record producer Shahar just sent it to me, having archived that list...

Clayton Hill wrote:
 Pretty gross, this glorification of an inconsequential blip in the history of Psychedelia. I don't think that Syd had all that much to do with the "Floyd" that most have come to know and love (Meddle onwards). I also don't think that he warrants this hero worship or pity, as he seems to have chosen this for himself, and would prefer NOT to be written thusly into history books and culture. As "brilliant" as Syd and his times may have been, articles like this only deepen the twisted legends and mythologies that are unproductive and unrepresentative of a culture, at best.
______________________
Chris Case wrote:
It could be argued that legends and mythologies are in fact among the most representative aspects of a culture. As for "unproductive", that is hardly a relevant criterion, despite the modern obsession with Productivity. Nevertheless, it is certain that Syd was the inspiration -- the soul, if you will -- of the Pink Floyd, which in turn influenced and inspired many of the artists who now do likewise for many in the current wave. Mythologically speaking, Syd has been inducted into the pantheon as an instance of the archetype "Poete Maudit", updating in a way the Rimbaud archetype.

That said, the article does perpetuate the perspective typical of journalists and fans, namely that the most famous person in a group is the centre of it, implying that the people sharing space with him at 101 Cromwell Road and later at Egerton Court were "camp-followers" or "hangers-on." Nothing could be farther from the truth. Just about everybody there had his own thing, most were there before he came, and some of them his childhood friends. The creative atmosphere owed less to him than to such residents as poet John Esam (who co-organised the Albert Hall Poetry Festival), filmmaker Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon (now producing great films about fractals, Mandelbrot, mathematics, etc.), photographer Dave Larcher, graphic artists Storm Thorgerson and and the others who formed Hipgnosis, visual artist Dave Gale (Lumiere & Son), poet-author of The Book of Grass George Andrews, budding alchemist Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, etc., etc. Other visitors to 101 included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Kenneth Anger, Alex Trocchi, and various Stones and Beatles. I could make a list twice as long, but the point is that Syd was there because it was one focal point of the matrix from which sprang 60s London psychedelia.

 Of course, in addition to the psychonauts there were people who came merely because it was a Scene, people stuck at the level of personalities. Interestingly enough, many of these are the ones most eager to be interviewed about the carryings-on there, and their accounts often miss the essence as much as they themselves missed the point at the time through their exclusive focus on personalities.

Syd was our holy fool for a time, though by no means the best poet among us, and, as things started to go bad, the recipient of vast amounts of protective concern. Unfortunately, none of us could without hypocrisy advise him to stop taking acid completely, but the efforts made to chill him out (I found Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier and St. Matthew Passion particularly effective) and rescue him repeatedly from his own flakiness were such that it is way off the mark to call this circle "fairweather friends". If anyone abandoned him, I'd say it was Roger, and his feelings of guilt permeate the Floyd's subsequent work ad nauseam. Had the friends who tried to introduce him to the therapeutic and harmonising effects of Shabad Yoga (yoga of cosmic sound) been more successful, he might have emerged from this episode as purged as many others of us did, but they certainly got no help from Roger, whose oafish dismissal of mysticism in favour of a middleclass version of surly "working-class hero" resentment gradually moved the Floyd's weltanshauung from Syd's sensitivity to English game-reality and from his whimsical symbology into schizoid antisocial ranting, culminating in "The Wall", or perhaps in an account at Coutts. Great stuff occurred along the way, I admit, but on the whole the Floyd betrayed the original vision and went down a profitable cul-de-sac, much as the "More is More" crowd of performers are doing today in the trance world.
_________________________________________

Clayton Hill wrote:

It's too bad that our culture, so bent on the misery and misfortune of others, can't respect his wishes and leave this man alone.
_______________________

Chris Case wrote:

This man manages to be as alone as he wishes to be. The occasional journalist or fan overloading his doorbell's bandwidth is hardly a form of persecution, compared to what most people have to put up with. I see no reason why he should expect total immunity to the karmic consequences of his own earlier behaviour. Pity of a sort might be natural, but there are countless more acid casualties who don't have ongoing royalties sustaining their alienated lives.

And if the truth be known, many of the most "successful" of that period failed every bit as much to evolve as spiritual and human beings, knighthoods to the contrary notwithstanding. Perhaps inside every Sir Mick there is a Syd Barrett struggling to deny himself. What the lucky few (George Harrison?) find through success is a deeper humility; if this is what Syd has found, he will only deserve our pity if he doesn't eventually also find compassion..

Cyberpunktuations

One of my articles in the Tokyo PC Users' Club magazine (c.1990) was a condensation of a article on cyberpunk by Mark Downham, some of whose statements were so obscure or pretentious that I was inspired to make cartoons of them:

         

Charge It To My Valentine Card

Some years ago (around 1990, in fact), when I was editor of the Tokyo PC Users Club magazine, I wrote this poem for the February Issue.  I suppose I might be sued someday for copying the Look and Feel of "Let's Get Away from It All"...

Dub Rhapsody-DJ Chris Mix

Here's a recording of a DJ set I played some time ago, in which all the tracks are at least somewhat dubby.

DUB RHAPSODY

DJ Chris@ Spring Equinox Party at Anagra, Tokyo

Since I had no car transport available, I was unable to take my usual pile of CD cases, so for the first time I loaded DJ software onto a laptop, quickly figured out the basics, and took it and an external HDD to the venue. However, since the audio card has only one output, I was unable to pre-listen to tracks, so all crossfades were done on the basis of memory and graphic display. Therefore, some of the transitions are less than optimal, though none are actual "trainwrecks". But I am really happy with the selections I found myself making on the fly, and with the overall arc and development; Despite its lack of precise beat- and key-matching on the crossfades, I think it may be the best set I've ever done. It ranges from ambient to fairly intensely rhythmic downtempo and back to ambient, with ethnic and classical samples mixed in with some of the tracks...

INTO THAT SILENT SEA

At the age of 18 I traveled by sea from Boston to England, and the following year wrote this story, a mixture of fact and imagination inspired as much by my great devotion to the writings of Joseph Conrad as by the voyage itself.
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INTO THAT SILENT SEA 

Night falls magnificently upon the ocean; the darkening clouds, sky, and water interpenetrate until they surround you with a unified, brooding hemisphere of mingling greys and blues. Until it sinks into the whitecaps marking the horizon, the expiring sun cuts across the sea a path shifting slowly from yellow to orange to red, silvered here and there with the crests of the waves. It is a scene no camera or brush can recreate, so greatly is its impact dependent upon an engulfing Nature secure in its own grandeur.

    Preoccupied with these musings, I leaned lazily on the starboard rail of the small freighter which was bearing me doggedly, if not rapidly, across the Atlantic. With only half a dozen fellow passengers, I was finding the trip singularly uneventful, but my enforced idleness was not difficult to accept as an opportunity to give myself up to reflection and to the reading of whatever battered books I could purloin from the crew`s library. The isolation encouraged introspection, and such was the receptivity of my indolence that I was somewhat annoyed when the dinner bell called me away from my twilight reveries.

The food on the ship was, fortunately, unexceptionable, but that evening I was compelled to consume it to the accompaniment of ceaseless chatter from the individual seated opposite, a woman of indeterminate age and unquenchable enthusiasm, who, bent on a three week perusal of Europe with her balding and non-descript husband, harangued me at great length upon the virtues and vicissitudes of a sea voyage. After the meal I returned to the deck, but the night air had chilled in the interim, and I consequently made my way to the lounge, where several of the passengers, driven by their dislike of inactivity, had begun a half-hearted game of cards which they induced me to join.

We played for several hours in a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke which thickened gradually as the evening slid towards midnight. At length winners and losers alike drifted away towards their dimly lit cabins, searching their somnolent minds for plans for the morrow’s activities, and bracing themselves for another night of struggling to remain in the bunks of a ship gyrating rhythmically in the swells created by a hurricane some two hundred miles distant.

As I sat alone in the lounge of the silent ship, I tried to divest myself of all thoughts by staring at the clouds of stale smoke floating to the yellowed ceiling, but through my mind ran continual pictures of the sea, sometimes flat and infinite in blazing sun, sometimes agitated and forbidding, menaced by grey and lowering skies, mixing stealthily in my imagination its multifarious shades.

I left the lounge and groped my way to the forward deck, where I leaned against a mast and watched the indifferent stars flash intermittently as they glided smoothly back and forth within the angular frames thrown by the swaying rigging against the black of the sky. From where l stood, the bow appeared as a sharp, black triangle cutting off from view the horizon and the dark-running sea as it soared upward towards the stars on the crest of a swell, then revealing the restless water again as it plunged downwards into the smoothly curving trough.

I caught sight of the man on the bow only when he struck a match for his pipe, and his face, strangely illuminated by the wavering flame, cut through my thoughts to pierce the illusion of my complete isolation.  A feeling something akin to resentment sprang up in me at the realisation that another human being was intruding on a scene of which I had considered myself the sole spectator and therefore in some way the possessor. When he heard my approaching footsteps, he turned towards me, and in the dim light diffusing towards the bow from amidships I could see him smile amiably as he said, “Enjoying the night air?”

“And the view," I replied.

 My initial disturbance at his presence had given way to gratitude for having a companion to talk with. In addition, I realized that since this man was apparently the bow watch, he was out here not to experience the beauty of the night, but to perform a duty he would probably prefer to neglect. The scene, I surmised, could mean nothing to him, its poetry doubtless long since dulled by familiarity. But his next remark revealed the inaccuracy of my judgment.

“Beautiful, isn`t it ?”

It was more a tentative statement than a question, uttered in a quiet voice suggesting a greater degree of sensitivity than one might expect in a sailor.

“It’s as if you`re the only person in the world, standing here at the point of the ship, nothing in front of you except the sea and night, your back turned on the ship, everything which reminds you of other men out of sight and hearing behind you. Come, stand up here and see what I mean.”

Somewhat surprised by his voicing of thoughts so similar to my own, l nevertheless stepped onto the narrow platform wedged into the angle where port and starboard fuse into one, consolidating their separate identities into a single point. As I leaned out into the night, all traces of the ship disappeared around the periphery of my vision, and I was left with the awesome illusion of hanging mysteriously supported above dark waters gliding silently beneath me. I felt myself millions of miles from the rest of the world, hovering in the gentle breeze above the dark Atlantic while humanity slept in distant cities and towns, unaware of the supremely self-sufficient seas rolling on timelessly in the distance.

“You know," said my companion at length, “I once had a skipper who used to come out on deck every night and lean over the railing, gazing at the water. He sometimes came up to the bow when I was on watch, and talked with me a little, although he usually just stared out into the night. One time, when he was staring particularly hard at the water below, he said something strange to me. He sort of muttered under his breath, ‘It seems to me that if there’s anything absolute in this universe, it must be like this sea beneath us. It offers itself to us, but we only skim precariously across it in tin boxes, never grasping the eternity it represents.” I didn`t understand him then, but mumbled a few words of agreement before going below - it was the end of my watch. As I was about to enter the crew’s quarters, I looked back and saw him outlined against the sky, motionless, his head in his hands, his elbows on the rail. The next morning he was gone. We put out boats to look for him, but they found nothing. Maybe he slipped, maybe he jumped. I’m inclined to think he jumped. He never was a very happy man, and he seemed to believe the sea was offering some sort of infinity and peace to him. I sometimes think I see what he meant.”

I thought I did too. I myself could feel to a disconcerting degree the pull of the bottomless waters, could sense beneath me something limitless and inscrutable. I myself would not jump, but I could see how years upon years at sea could impress upon a man, burdened as this captain was with an unsatisfactory existence, the desire to be swallowed up by a world of primeval silence. One jump, and a world left behind, a finite world quivering with the desperation of its ferocity, surrounded and baffled by a seemingly impenetrable night.

The two of us remained silent. Our thoughts were the same, perhaps. A fog I had not noticed closed in upon us, and soon the lights from the small island of humanity amidships faded and were gone. I bid goodnight to the man I could see but dimly, and made my way to the centre of the sleeping ship. It was a bit too dark, and I wanted some light.