I have a feeling that when Arisugawa Park is finished I will have established some sort of unique reputation in the literary firmament, as a cloud novelist (if nothing else). Future books will be more closely read and probably leave me wishing I had the free wheeling animus of my life up to now––by not playing the competition game I have fooled many into devaluing what I offer. Which suits my purposes fine... 

The point being that my ambitions are still generally as a novelist. I enjoy being in characters' heads for a good long while. Cowachunga is interesting and I will get back to it. I realize that I cannot really work on Kyle and Dylans' Big Adventure without being in Nevada. And doing some legwork in Australia.

Meanwhile, I have this idea of a novella that mirrors my quest for fabric. Set in Boracay during the changeable Habagat season, mirroring  realizations I have had recently. 

Continuing the adventures of David,  Habagat is officially a piece of EVEN (as Arisugawa Park now turns out to be). Please have patience, this is a true first draft, it will change dramatically over the next couple years. I am not ashamed of the initial poetry that leads to half thought-out cadences, which are later strung into paragraphs, more detailed graspings at meaning.

By the way, click on the Soundcloud link to get the WIP concept album Chasing the Sun. Call it what you want, it is original and the reason is not all me. Which is how it should be. 

​#endwriter

Starting at Station One, from the alley near Pau Lazaro’s––now inhabited beachside by TGIF Fridays––David walked along the five kilometer stretch of white sand beach, trying to feel the elusive tropical paradise vibe. Though it was nominally offseason, he sensed only crowding, hustling. Had it always been like this or was it suddenly more acute, all of the developing world problems crammed into one tiny island that provided a living for so many families, now peppered with corporations? A tripling of room capacity in two years, an influx of crowds everywhere. More and more money funneled to major corporations––it was not entirely his imagination. He was watching the consequences of unchecked growth under his nose, the maxing of systems to a continuous crisis point. The constant denuding of the island of natural beauty, with no coherent voices being raised. 

Was this what had happened to Waikiki in one impactful decade, a thousand beach entrepreneurs taking root before it got out of control and planners were called in to create car-fed order? No, it had always been so… the Earth had been through worse, two World Wars. And yet... what if the trials of the 20th century had been but a prelude to the chaos of the 21st? When true scarcity gripped the Earth, washed through with the power of extreme need and envy––not Mad Max desperate, but close. Trump destined not to win, but a snake oil harbinger––as ISIS burned at the other end, fear working its inevitable dance of fragmentation, attrition.

David was here because he had turned nomad one of those years when he was grasping for a stationary place. If  this was the frontline of development and he could afford to be here, living his allotted time on earth––then here he was. The perfect place to begin a win-win fight among those who cared and would be open to caring. Like Doc Ricketts setting up a marine conservation biological services lab, incognito among the clanking  factories of Cannery Row––the Monterey Bay depopulated of its millions of sardines in 20 sad years, sacrificed to feed an army cloaked in patriotism, generating industrial growth even as it compelled the world to kill no more. 

If fabric was to start it would have to start here he decided, in Boracay and other places where the scale was not too great, where the disease had not spread to the point where all decisions were made in high towers. The island was small enough and the beach sunset unique enough that the consequences of overdevelopment could not be avoided––no matter how much it might be in the local character to do so. It was the beginning of the stormy season, Habagat, and he was somewhere close to home.
​
#Habagat

Arisugawa Park 1.24 - Native Trickster. A brand new section of the burgeoning cloud novel. Hayao makes friends with a stray cat in Azabu and tracks Eve.

The writing is a lot slower, more intricate, than what most people have time for on the Internet. But the print publishing world won't touch my stuff. Thanks for checking it out, on track to get there by the time I reach the venerable almost-retired Tokyo detective's age. 

The real interest of this book for me, and ultimately the root of its complexity, is the layers of experience interlaced. Some passages I wrote 10 years ago, nearly unchanged. Other entire sections were composed just a week ago. 

Note that Arisugawa Park 1.24 - Peach, featuring David at a swank Roppongi Hills hostess club, went live a couple weeks ago. This section of new material took a little longer to work into shape. And (gulp) there must be one more, Hayao swimming in a dark city that knows how to keep its secrets. 

#endwriter 

​This remnant patch, Hayao thought, looking the cat in the eye and holding gaze, sensing a deep-in-the-bones stirring. After the death of old Ms. –––, the property had passed into the hands of her children, who were soothed into submission by a developer-connected lawyer with discreet letterhead and elite clientele. The legalese-cushioned words of an elegantly appointed solicitor held far more weight than an underutilized acre of green, vividly remembered but far from the dispersed children’s everyday grind of deadlines and eternity-long commutes. With the property’s sale they might just might be able to afford houses within spitting distance of the Yamanote-line that defined central Tokyo––where commutes were measured in minutes, not hours––though in neighborhoods bereft of sanity-saving green. 

And so the process of diminishment had continued, property surveyed and sold, house and garden demolished in a jarringly short time. One more fold of “borrowed” landscape lost for however long humans were around to define eternity. Hayao shrugged and the cat seemed to shrug with him––at least a high-rise had not taken its place, the architecture as soothingly minimalist as the 10-foot slate grey wall around the urban compound-cum-villa. With a noted dot-com entrepreneur the owner, the property had taken taking on a digitally rendered aspect of high gates and hard steel, a boxy, glass-stretched minimalist’s wet dream, its primary message one of discreet ostentation. 

His feet carrying him further, Hayao half turned and looked back and the cat seemed to nod in shared apprehension that its habitat might be gone, just like that––the fate of one of the last havens for native tricksters hanging by one blood soaked cough or senile lapse. And yet, as the cat’s sudden shift in demeanor indicated, hope persisted––it was now fully engrossed on a padded approach to an infant bird fallen out of nest lodged in a crease in the slate-grey wall. Parents flying over its head, chirping to no avail, the cat took the crippled bird by the neck and carried it in its mouth, trophy-like to its den. Life and death always found a way.  

Hayao shook his head, forward focused. The point of the wandering became clear as he let the core questions settle. Local was how you defined it, native an evolving process. Though Eve was not from here that did not mean she did not know the area––perpetrator or victim, she might just have enough of the trickster in her to adapt.
​
The question was––Eve having last been caught on camera at the Hyatt, a couple hundred meters from Roppongi Crossing––what were the chances of her subsequent route to major transportation hubs going undetected? There were cameras littering this area, yet they were not quite pervasive––the narrow lanes offered some respite from the digital grid, despite the billion yen residential compounds. There was still an innate appreciation among many for the value of discretion, an unwillingness to pin down the unknowable. Eve could certainly have ditched the cameras at the Hyatt and passed unobserved to Azabu station, blended into turnstile queue at the right moment, when the crowds were at their most intense. 

Yet Hayao was not convinced that his quarry could have stitched together a maze-like path to Azabu-Juban at just the right time, without some sort of intimate topographic knowledge. She could have hopped in a taxi––though why she would not have done that earlier was not clear. Hayao blinked––there was one other possibility of course––she had not been headed to the station. A safe haven, the home of a well-connected friend or lover––maybe she even had the money to rent here––or had her journey had been unwilling truncated? The latter possibility, strangely, he could not quite shake. Looking up at the darkening sky and emerging lights of nearby buildings, Hayao decided it was time to head in to Roppongi, where a whole other definition of tricks prevailed.

​#AriPark

As reported* in the Guardian, the woeful, socially and environmentally suicidal––not to mention corrupt and half-assed––preparations for the Rio Olympics are proceeding apace. This is not isolated, but within a long tradition of short-sighted SNAFU Olympic preparations dating back a century. Three-time Olympian Megan Kalmoe offered an entitled apologetics for the tip-of-the-iceberg "brown water" situation I will row through shit for you, America. To which I commented:
​
"If the athletes banded together and created a consensus declaration that Olympics preparations must be done in a sustainable and financially transparent  way, countries would have no choice but to listen. Then the athletes we admire would have accomplished something for the greater good."

#‎endwriter #‎fabric

As you can see, the #endwriter tag** is now pretty fixed and stable, probably getting a few dozen views daily through Twitter, FB, and journalistic comment sections. The others come and go depending on the topic of a particular post or blog article. #fabric, #AriPark, #Even, and #ChasingTheSun are the three that seem to have evolved. #Cowachunga may come after I reach the halfway point of the Arisugawa Park (oh wait, there's one more) #CloudNovel project.

Speaking of which, the next section of the cloud novel should be coming in a few hours. I am taking time to make sure that each section feels somehow new and complete. I really enjoy spending time with each character, at points in my day between  coffee, tea,  flute, pale pilsen, books, daydreams, and beach jog swims. 

*My FB comment on the original article: "Seen from a certain perspective, the Olympics are an excuse for corrupt developers to go in and make land grabs and create white elephant project and "gift" communities for civil servants. Eye opening."

​** Short for #endurancewriter and also representing a group of earth-shaping cloud writers (and multi-media creatives) who will shape future history in the multi-level literary concept EVEN. 

I'm back in Boracay after some adventures in Guimaras and Iloilo, the fabric concept hitting me harder than ever. So difficult to find time in the day to create music, cloud novel, hang, earn money, and conceive of fabric.

But after a long conversation with Gerhard, owner of Frendz resort, over Globy pizza and mango shake (both excellent) a lot of things were clarified about how Boracay could work as a beta. He even knows someone who may... let's just leave it at that. 

For Arisugawa Park followers, I have painstakingly constructed––100 percent new––an imminent Hayao retracing Eve's steps and communing with stray felines section. You want the full process of creating literature to proceed in real time? Get used to an occasional wait. Just like I got used to writing quality shit with no compensation the past decade. I realize now that the penalty of refusing to play their game is..... big shrug. 

​#endwriter

I decided to go ahead and put the evolution of Chasing The Sun on Soundcloud. The thing is, I’ll be in Boracay for a month writing, jogging, swimming, jamming flute, and canvassing fabric for the first (or second) section of EVEN, tentatively titled Habagat.* 

Considering my track record with devices, there is a good chance that my laptop will explode and my backups get washed off in a tsunami. Meanwhile John Dumagod at Alchemy does not seem any more secure with his files than me. At least this way there is something up, a recorded legacy of all this inspiration and half-assed progress.**

What I present here is the first four studio tracks, in the order I see them flowing well (barring some later sounds that nestle in-between with plentitude).

There are plenty of “extras” in the recordings that will disappear in the final edits and master Here, a little cataloging, as much for master-mixer John’s benefit as for the reader-cum-listener:

1. Lost Upward - all is good.

2. UFOs and Labyrinths - Nix background chatter. Take out the vocal section between 5:13 and 5:34. Make the ending scat vocals a little less powerful on the ears. Maybe increase volume slightly on beginning and ending “Pork Pie Hat” sections. 

3. UFOs (Fragile Bones) - Altheia’s vocals lower just a bit. Chatter wiped. Thinking of taking out Altheia’s vocals from (? to ?). Need to hear both versions to compare. 

4. Fly Away Home - Transition between intro instrumental and vocal starting has obvious continuity issues… maybe a little light cymbals or guitar to segue them? First two vocal verses need to be redone… the low speaking voice does not do it for me.

About the section where the climactic guitar was excised (20:30 to 20:43)––there is a missing rhythmic flute flourish that we already recorded. Another issue is that we need to get some bongos circling around that absence of guitar, early-1970s Santana style. Some of the flutes after that are wrong, need to make sure the right tracks are in place. This will take some sit-down editing. 

*Habagat is the often grey season between “summer” and typhoon season. Acoustic guitarist Paolo went so far as to suggest, considering my preferred musical dynamics (or simply the recent weather?) that we call the project Chasing Habagat.

**That is until $70-million-in-debt Soundcloud goes under and takes their massive archives with them. hehe.

***It is interesting that the flute sounds comparatively so shitty on these field recordings… has to do with the very subtle, quick tone variations and the number of bits available, or so I’ve heard (similar issue experienced with the trumpet).
​

First time I can say this about a contemporary writer in a good long while: James Morrow’s The Philosopher’s Apprentice gave me a major shiver…  on page 69 I realized that all the archly knowing, slightly antiquated, philosophical English (bad puns and faux etymologies included) has been taking me somewhere––

My notes at the time (major spoiler: "the two girls Lonny and Donny must have been biologically interbred by Edwina Sabachtani with her own eggs, in cahoots with the mad doctor Charkov, with some some fast-and-loose animal kingdom intellect, like a cephalopod. At the very least they are cloned sisters. They both have exactly the same issue, a lack of rectitude, and the ability to read and process super fast. Oh shit… what a mind warp. This is not Swiftian, this is….. philosophy for the biogenetic era. 

And 30 pages on–– "the book really kind of lost me. It moved too fast––could have explored a whole host of other philosophic  imponderables while making the reader really care what would happen to Lonny when she found out she was a clone of her “mother” and inhabited an island with a “clone” sister. The curse of (post) modern literature, even of the traditional sort. Moves two miles ahead the moment you start to care about characters as real persons.

Note to self: Don’t play this same trick in the sections of EVEN. Make them cohere.

The concept of EVEN as a multi-part novel continues to evolve:

The idea now is to commence a series of writing projects that last no more than 40,000 words each and explore different aspects of the EVEN scenario. This approach is not unlike that Isaac Asimov took with the Foundation “trilogy” which was pieced together from short stories published in Amazing Fact over the course of the 1940s. Full disclosure, I have not read them, could not stand Asimov’s style in the one book of his I owned, A Dictionary of Nearly Everything.

​I came across the Foundation concept in––get this––an article I wrote as part of my Azimovian 1,500 words of fresh, acceptably self-edited prose each day for my dot company. Clients like the darnedest things and I learn a lot through the process of regurgitation––usually with an endwriter twist.*

Back to the music:

I have been listening to the current Chasing the Sun tracks quite a bit and there are  four that cohere as an incipient song cycle. Though John has been completely unresponsive at Alchemy and they are in a way embryonic, I can listen to these in order and  enjoy the experience as one that objectively moves me. Never mind the thousand things I see in each that need fixing, this will happen in time. The thing is that the music is completely original and I find it compelling. 


My aim with CTS: not Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, contemplative Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, pre-1974 Bob Marley, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Jim Morrison, Grażyna Auguścik, Django Reinhardt, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Jack Johnson, Sublime, Mark Eitzel, Mazzy Star, John Mayall, Nick Drake, Lana Del Rey, Beatles, Fleet Foxes, Otis Redding, pre-1975 Pink Floyd, Jun Mazeree, Alex Chilton, Brian Wilson, or anyone else. But it would not be out-of-place on a record shelf with those artists. 


Current song lineup:

1. Lost Upward
2. UFOs & Labyrinths 
3. Fragile Bones (I’m On My Way)
4. Fly Away Home

I just had this little Facebook exchange with Althetheia (who makes tracks two and three what they are) about the album, as it takes shape:

D: Maybe there could be one with your husband and you and my flute... like a cosmic poetry––intertwining of three sounds. I'm pretty sure this is an approach only people who don't read music take, but... the album is taking shape as a song cycle somehow.

A: Yessssss lets do that! also i was thinking maybe you wanna grab those guys who we jammed with at the office to do the smoke to joints/englishman in new york HAHAHA

D: hmmm... I am thinking that if we did something, we could start jamming that, but you know... I am all about original stuff unless it’s an interpretation I really care about

A: yeah remember our jam it was so far out!

D: and none of it got recorded! hahahaha the mike did not really work––so we will have to do an even more space one, maybe at the beach or waterfall

A: yes!

D: One cover song I am thinking of for the album is Bob Marley's Heat of the Day. I like these rare, unknown gems really. I have a feeling your husband could get these chords and sound down... maybe he could even sing it.

A: hell yeah i was thinking what if we also did a random song and we all play instuments we are unfamiliar with hahahahhahaha

D: you on the flute, me on the bass... the interesting thing about that song I did with you is that in parts your voice is actually in the same tonality as the flute... it sounds like a flute. like this is really something new if we get one really deep song out of it.

A: hehehe your flute and i get along!

D: like sustain it across an entire song, we could trade off on the parts, like when I improv you do some repetitive sustain and vice versa. Can't tell the diff, which is flute and which is human?

A: haha yes like the whole album is made to confuse the listener hahahah

D: the point is not to confuse, but to catch the listener by surprise––make them really hear that there is a  message in music of the now. because the earth can’t wait.

#endwriter

The Beach, Somewhere 

*Recall the “one step ahead of the bots” conceit mentioned in the previous blog? Guess where it comes from.

​*At least, by being totally nonfunctional, the latest version of Pages prevents me from attempting to be my own publisher and layout editor. (For the same reason, sayonara iMovie, Photos––moving toward totally distraction free). Incidentally, all this talk of Apple devices brings me back to thoughts of Dennis, who is fighting. 

** Actually, Notes works for all media types, I guess that is the future. Waiting for some multi-dimentional artist to create a "Note-book." Which leads to a fundamental question: how to partition the written word, which is what I really want to see, from the distractions that are pushed on me?

*** Weebly does this too, though it is a blog design platform, not on the same level of sin.

**** This is not quite the end of the story––forced linguistic sameness opens its own evolutionary pathways. In EVEN there is an intellectual clique that actively blogs in algorithmically new ways along certain channels, staying ahead of the bots. These endwriters actually go where fabric cannot as a capitalist platform (considering economic paradoxes that get increasingly well defined as the years pass and little progress is made on global warming). Through advanced SEO and the ability to influence linguistic and (Pandora-fed) music trends, the endwriters push profoundly toward a cloud-influenced reality that is sustainability oriented. They bypass the physical altogether and go for the information jugular––for a cause. The creation of the first truly "non-favoring-the-rich-countries" global agreement with teeth (move over WTO and United Nations) EVEN––the Environmental and Engineering Neutrality Pact.

The failsafe of learned experience, the sounds of speaking something so quiet it approaches wisdom. 

The mass quantification of data, projected onto offline activity, takes away one of the great mysteries of literature. It had nothing to do with how many people actually read the damn book. 

You could not quantify influence, maybe you still can’t––but perception is two-thirds of reality.

Technology has become, if not a god, something trusted way too much. And feared––fear has always been the basis of a good religion. “God is a DJ” was no accidental formulation.

We are all in this together. We all gang up on the same bright minds. We sap their energy and imagine we are immortal. To the furnace, you and I….

Shed my smartphone like the snake it is––leave it to know-it-all nothings, hack amateurs, and trolls. I want to experience what real knowing is again. To not hashtag and geolocate adventures… if no one knows, mystery is preserved. If the formula is buried… seldom shared… people start digging and begin replicating the cicada patterns of only arriving when they are ready. 

Literary tie-in: Staying one or two cycles ahead of the current state-of-the-algorithm.* Obscurity a bargain among those who want to speak and never quite be found. To out-Pynchon the best, to stay one step ahead of the thunder. 

Delivered, bundled, transmitted, and discretely logged. And amidst all that basic confusion. If we know everything why is the earth insistently telling us we know very little? The bogeyman is… you guessed it….**

* FABRIC future novel spoiler: state-of-the-algorithm, SOTA to endwriters.

​** Pogo, circa 1968.

​#endwriter

When you’re in a slat-windowed traditional Filipino house, open to the outside (think Hawaii), get used to ants. Lots of them, quick ones. Remembering that water comes from a well and must be laboriously retrieved outside. Therefore water cannot be liberally splashed around on countertops. If you use paper or plastic it will be burned or buried in the backyard––what to do?

You could get all toxic on the ants with chalk or poison, but ultimately what’s the point? They’re cleaner than us and as Ivy says after a nice dinner of roast chicken, and malangay and papaya laden tinola (chicken soup), cooked over charcoal, “they’ll all be gone by tomorrow and the counter will be clear of crumbs.” Which is true.

And what of the flying beetles that go after computer screens at night? Well––what of them?
#endwriter

As Facebook reminded me... a year ago... well, I had an agent, she was talking to the big publishers. Ego stoked and expecting at least a small advance, I decided to start putting up my next novel as I wrote it. Cowachunga was something new, the plot is still with me. 

However, it was paused indefinitely as I realized that Arisugawa Park would never get out there unless I put it up as a cloud novel. 

The novelizing process continues incrementally and all I can say is that my writing is up here, for those who care to explore. Until a time comes again that quality writing earns cash it's a sideline, a slow and steady hobby.

The wifi has been iffy to nonexistent, which means I have actually made some progress on Ari Park in lieu of reading constantly about how the wheels are coming off the bus.

I realized that––perfectionist that I am, I cannot go forward with the cloud novel without an episode of Hayao winding his way around the streets of Azabu and ruminating––on the scent of Eve. I am also trying to decide certain things about how David's time at the ultra-luxe hostess club Peach progresses. 

Thank you for your patronage. Visitors seem to come in steady here, whether I post or not. Thinking about working out an algorithm, cutting and pasting materials from around the Interweb. Let the bots do the work, feast on the toils of writers past. Surf the surfeit of raw data.

#endwriter