The Fabric Dos project tools on it the TJ borderlands, yesterday I had a memorable sesh with Maura Rosa, a respected solo presence in the local scene. It was the sixth time in my life I have picked up an electric guitar, two of which were relatively recent sessions. Just like acoustic but wheeeee!

​For those interested enough to click a small hyperlink, the work in progress Namida (Borderlands) V9 is up on Soundcloud. This is what we worked off of, adding auditory colorations that will hopefully provide infill and expand the song to 13 minutes in length. Respectable Miles Davis territory.

​A little publicity, this is Maura's concert tonight:

As far as the next Arisugawa Park - Shudder installment? Give me a day or two. I think I left it on quite a cliffhanger, I am as excited to see what happens as you are.

Halfway through this Cloud Novel "rewrite a section of Arisugawa Park" endeavor, I feel a sense of accomplishment. Writers may understand that nagging discomfort that comes when you only half connect with a character. Eve was always like that for me... while I based Kaori more on people I knew, or situations I witnessed while living in Japan, Eve was a character I only glimpsed in fragments. I want to know more about her and why I admire her later survival-focused actions. And I want Lise also to become a more complex character. 

A misconception that many readers have about my book and purpose in writing involves genre. Attending a mystery writer's conference and wearing that hat was lame a ruse to get the attention of an agent and I came out of my shell just long enough to realize that outside of the academies no one really cared. Forget the fact that K–– was part of an agency that represented Faulkner and Huxley, it is apparent that in changing the agency name the target market also shifted. I do not have the energy to deal with taste-makers and who those who find hooks in art.

Any yet... and yet... if the writing market does not raise an eyebrow at hard-fought prose, individual readers care. The same way I do when I encounter a writer with whom I connect. In the past year I have connected with Joseph Conrad,  Erskine Childers, and Jonathan Franzen. (I tried to connect with Samuel Johnson and failed). I do not have the wherewithal to trawl the web in search of talent, but I am always hoping to come across that great unpublished talent. The cloud novelist, a conceit that (at least in this blog) is approaching reality.

The point of Arisugawa Park, with its indecipherable and yet distinctly Japanese title, is not an accurate portrayal of the country––the purported duty of writers who set their tales in foreign climes. ​We can read authors such as Alan Furst to gain details, if that is what we are after, of the trappings of the time––presented to expand technical knowledge and create a vision in the mind that hearkens back to classic representations. A realistic tableau that seems formulaic in its essence.

That is not what I am after. I want the reader of Arisugawa Park to feel a bit of discomfort in his or her life, an awakening, just as I did at the moment at which I set the story. Though inertia took me back to the States and a last concerted attempt at office-bound livelihood. 

The thing is, I have lived abroad, traveled for many years, interacted with people from many cultures, and observed. What I am really trying to tie together in AP is not a sense of Japan, but a sense of possibility within a world in which all seems to have been explored (is this is what the algorithms and bombardment of fake news have tricked us into thinking?) The dumbing down process is nearly complete, but for a few bastions––the sheer numbers of people with half the story (or less) and purporting to know all is astounding. The sheer number of clicks at bait and the diminishing recompense that follows. 

In a sense my signpost for Arisugawa Park is Kafka's Amerika, which I found to be not a great work per se but compelling in the freedom he allowed himself, long before magical realism was a thing, to create a serious novel that was purely his own imaging of a place. Oh, and to name the "hard k" title after that conceit, which seemed to detail individual reaction against the emergent bureaucratic underpinnings of fascism.

Arisugawa Park is about that moment when one loses tether to a specific country-defined moral code and starts thinking for oneself. Personal evolution, on either side of the wall. Trying to pretend the wall doesn't exist. Failing that, gaining inertia to take some kind of action.

Thanks for reading and continuing to read and may this ultimately earn me the wherewithal to turn my attention to Cowachunga, which I have been mulling, and lacking the time and space to put into action, for two years now.

Or let the Fabric Dos music project be the breakthrough and let the readers follow as they may. The few who find their way here and share with one or two friends is enough. 

#endwriter #ChasingSun

They said it could not be done, that literary art could not be created on one's own terms, outside the system. They said the Cloud Novel was dead. Those nefarious pranksters, those who convinced the gullible reading public that what they wanted was social interaction, not quality. The broadsheet purveyors of fake news, post-truth.

With your understanding that this is a work-in-progress, I present you Arisugawa Park 2.5 - Shudder, Part Four. 

Revisions since pub: Seven.* (Are you counting literary gods?  It's me, Damon).

​#AriPark ​

That night and its aftermath had taken Eve straight out of her teaching shell, given her wings to beat against the specific gravity of conformance that glued her colleagues to predictable paychecks, karaoke nights, and occasional trips to Tokyo. Their impulsive connection, which ended immersed in deepest pleasure, lost in a trail of firefly lights, also provided a means of navigating her way to a more interesting life. Had Lise used her or had she used Lise? It was a valid question.

Eve appreciated her role of observer and guest, in a country of surface homogeneity and internal contrarianism. It was not boredom  that impelled her to Tokyo, not only attraction to Lise––there was something about rural Japan she very much admired. Cycling all afternoon across patchwork family farms, up forested hills with shrines, taking in the sheer beauty traditional life here offered. It was longstanding joke among teachers who had completed a competitive application process that they got paid simply to be themselves. Her grandmother applauded the fact that she was following in her footsteps, teaching––albeit halfway around the globe.

Had Eve been settled in her life, Lise’s smile and expression––even their casual touch as they leaned against the tree, seeking cool breeze through shared flap of fan, would have passed in an instant. If she had been in Tokyo a week longer it would have simply been one of thousands of daily human interactions.

There was another  impetus––a small thing she could not quite shake. Her looks marked her as exotic in her small town, she felt unwanted attention on a daily basis. Something in men's smiles... but it was manageable, nothing overt. A month ago her underwear had disappeared from the well-secured balcony.... she thought at first it had fallen onto the balcony below, but the old woman smiled bemusedly and shook her head. Then a favorite lucky panda disappeared from her bicycle handlebar when she stopped at the picnic area next to the reservoir and lay back in the grass with a book for an hour, watching patterns in clouds. She thought at first it had fallen off but no, she remembered distinctly glancing at it as she set the kickstand firm in the dirt. There was no question in her mind she needed to leave town sooner than later.

Lise offered a firm, pre-built structure of support in the center of Tokyo, where debt pushed many hungry-for-experience women toward precarious lives, gradations of servitude. For the first few weeks after moving in she saw Lise as a radiant goddess who could do no wrong. And yet time had not stood still after that first night. Eve had quickly confronted the limitations of her new environs, the gilt Ebisu penthouse in which she was allowed to spread her wings. Lise went through girlfriends, she freely admitted, like clockwork. She had her collection of handbags and well... that came first.  This rampant materialism was the financial aspect of their relationship, which ultimately made everything come undone.

#endwriter

Something unprecedented here... I am putting the significantly revised Arisugawa Park section 2.5 - "Shudder" up daily. What is this all leading to? Possibly a convergence with me being in Japan and writing the climactic sections of the cloud novel. Enjoy fellow travelers. ​One revision so far

​#endwriter

Shinjuku 12:35 pm

Eve sat surrounded by strangers, her mind in the particular cast of deadness that came with all subterranean journeys. The paleness of the riders on the subway, the way they pointedly avoided acknowledging each other, made her long for a place where people were passionate, often confrontational, but warm, always warm. She wondered if she had grown up in Tokyo and known no other place––would she have come to accept this particular form of coldness? Would it have driven her slowly mad?

Here in Tokyo people got on and off of subway cars as if ghosts, blanketing all serviceable places with their quiet, determined presences. Not human, not flesh and blood. People coming and going from cracks in the earth, taking sustenance in the flicker of pale sunlight through tall buildings. Motivated by longings that left her cold and shut out. Wrapped in a communal desire for––what exactly––money? Not only that. Recognition. A recognition of the mass and of its irresolvable ambition. An ambition for Japan to be… what? More. More than Japan. She shut her eyes and still the subway rattled on. 

​Most of all what Tokyo made her feel was lack of human contact. Part of it was her newness here––she had given up on old habits and friends to stay in a place that had come to her through osmosis, anime. But the hikikomori phenomenon of shut-in otaku reflected a pervading sense of quietness, distance.

​And that could be deadly in a position where (doh!) human relations were not easily intimate. Money had a way of putting a damper on desire. Feelings were now to be measured by the minute, which made no sense on a physiological level. The only reason it was bearable––why she accepted it in the spirit of the experiences one had in one’s twenties––was Lise.

#AriPark #CloudNovel

Fabric Dos... how can I explain... it's a lil like this. 

The song has been evolving into something very cool. Namida (Borderlands) Version 2  is the foundational idea. Now prepped for a Version 4 session on Friday (Version 3 is nothing like this). The original Namida jam will be released as the album bookend  to the opening instrumental.  

​#Fabric #ChasingSun

The LA Times has a rousing story West Coast states form a wall against Trump’s reactionary agenda today. I had to add my two cents: "California people deal with earthquakes, fires, high rents, and drought on a daily basis. They may think we are a bunch of quiche-eating idiots, but we have just figured out what works from hard experience."

#endwriter 

Here is another clue for you all: Frederick Vulcan, CEO of Creostone, Inc. And here is a poem that has been composed in tandem with the collaborative cover art for Fabric - Chasing Sun.

Manifest Destiny or Mass Regret?


Shopping malls and grocery carts,
slate grey skies, 
prescriptions, prescriptions––

where did it all go wrong?
where did expansion end 
and leave the wooded path 

off in a parking lot 
and who was pulling strings 
at the casino, and where 

did the hard earned money, 
the Community Chest––

How did it get siphoned
into waves of 
avarice, regret?

Like Baltic Avenue traded up to prison
stacks and stacks,
the luxury of nature hidden,
the Boardwalk.

Bankruptcy never entering into the equation,
the weighted wheel, the loaded dice––
Work is for suckers, right?
Money––just a way of acquiring a war chest.

The cast out, who swooned under wooden boards 
on a Santa Cruz night 
at the slightest gesture,
making love in the moonlight 
as the ocean laughed 

and found themselves
at the end of a snub-nose dictator,
doling lies as he motioned toward the iron gate,
inducing mongrel reactions, 
humping the American public on his leg,
the country in heat for revenge 

against phantom enemies, a vision 
of humanity more Devo than talking head,
mucho headroom, less reality,
Viva device.

Aging, as others know it–––
a welling anger,
time, focus, gains, attrition
that ache the mere 
reality of sagging balls. 

The bell tolls, to whom does it speak––
manifest destiny or mass regret?

#endwriter

I just found a guy on the boardwalk in playas who sold me a desert fossil that has the face of an alien on the front and a fleet of early-Creostone Age spaceships on the back. Perfect Cowachunga material (photo evidence to be produced at at time and place of my choosing). 

UFOs and Labyrinths has been getting a few likes from people. Glad that the music flow has a place in some peep's rotation. Ive been told it helps fall asleep... which is a vital aspect of human existence. 

Fabric Dos, here we go! Borderland style.

Notes to Diego, the purveyor of playas studio, bass, and creative ideas:

SEPARATE MY SOUL - (Dos, Track 2)
Three basic sections 
1. Rain on me.. RHCP funk rock groove 
2) We build and build.. more steady chords with harmony vocals 3) We Cry, we are crying - acoustic fingerpicking ballad waltz-time

IT'S THE WEEKEND AND I'M GONE - RENO NOT AGAIN (Dos Tracks 3 and 4)
Two Songs 
ITWAIG - kind of grungy beginning 
Reno - more like a big Joe Jackson beat and makes tap feet

HERE'S ANOTHER ONE (Dos, Track 5) 
Kind of heavy chain gang sound 
then old 60s My Generation/Summertime Blues (in-your-face) chords), I'm not fazed

Then there are the notes for the original jam we did, which is the basis for the first (instrumental) song of the concept album. 

 NAMIDA (BORDERLANDS) Version 2 (Dos, Track 1) 

Currently 4:34 - 

0:00 to :10 Extend intro another measure - add some demon chaser before bass comes in

00:34 to :41  Add another shorter cascade of guitar before flute comes 20 to 28…. 

Flute over-layers around 00:40 to :50

1:00 Mountain bassline… extend that another full measure (to about 1:21) before going to minor thing add more desert reverb guitar.. can we detune one of your strings slightly to create a deeper sound or have you create a half note somewhere?

1:47 to 1:49 improve transition to Mountain

1:50 to 2:07 I like the Mountain bass-line length there, but then it should kind of transition to an organic drum-centered desert vision… like dancing, scatting, or chanting… 

2:07 ? to ? Create a new little intro to Summertime section about 20 seconds in length (using actual bass pattern from SR) and then go into section that is currently 2:28 using existing bass pattern… 

I think ending is around 3:22 … skip last Mountain… but… keep that reverb guitar somehow at around 3:45 maybe it comes back in another song? or earlier chorus…

#ChasingSun

QUIPS: 

• On Christo's wrapping the Reichstag: amazing... to negotiate with six administrations on something. And have it come to fruition. Reminds me that there is a campaign afloat to elect Lady Gaga prez. 

• Re: "The map of tyranny. We are HERE."
well no not exactly... there is a small window until a crisis is manufactured that galvanizes the crazies. THEN you are there.

• Regarding Abe's recent shift in perception as one of the less hardcore international leaders out there: the lessons of WWII mean that accepted populism is less in your face in Japan? As in Germany. The gravity of a fool at the helm of a major country is not lost on them.

• Ever asked yourself, how does a cockroach get into the skull?

New Year's Resolution (still time):I have stopped seeking out articles about Trump. He rubs me the wrong way. It is like when I watched a few episodes of the Apprentice a decade ago and decided I didn't like his executive style. It was on to Lost, which had its own problems eventually.

Apparently Betsy DeVos, ordered an immediate flattening of all classroom globes (just a rumor at this point)? Maybe that's because that's where you place the food offerings for our grizzly brothers and sisters... glad she has had a change of heart. I was thinking that grizzlies could somehow find their way to "sanctuary states" like Colorado, but apparently it won't be necessary.

Across the pond, Frankie Boyle nails it. Including an urgent rationale for Fabric Dos:

"Obviously, the most important issue here is why America hasn’t done as well as in the past at capitalising on these horrors to create good music about the political turmoil. I mean, where is their Bob Dylan? Where are their anthems about drone warfare killing innocent civilians? Instead we’ve got Drake begging women via song to text him back after a fight at the Cheesecake Factory."

#endwriter
​

Usual hangout in Playa.
Is very foggy rainy these days I love it
real coastline
big waves

• Sobering and highly informed words from Columbia's ex-leader to Duterte, as a NY Times op ed:

"What do we propose? Well, for one, we do not believe that military hardware, repressive policing and bigger prisons are the answer. Real reductions in drug supply and demand will come through improving public health and safety, strengthening anticorruption measures — especially those that combat money laundering — and investing in sustainable development. We also believe that the smartest pathway to tackling drugs is decriminalizing consumption and ensuring that governments regulate certain drugs, including for medical and recreational purposes."

No, lets waste money and actively work against scientific, social, and medical programs that have an impact.

Although, with KellyAnne urging everyone to go out and purchase Ivanka gear online, even the comatose will soon start to realize that life did not magically get better when their guy won. 

Here is a real eyeopening paragraph in a Guardian article by Jonathan Jones, How can Barack Obama smile at a time like this? I think he knows something

"In our horror, we are missing the point that perhaps Obama has grasped. The Trump “movement” – as Trump likes to call it – died on inauguration day. That row about the numbers of people in Washington’s National Mall? It mattered. For without a mass movement that makes itself physically – and dangerously – felt on the streets, there can be no future for Mussolini-style bluster.
Trump has a stay-at-home electorate of reality tv fans. It is the left who are on the streets. It is his enemies who have the youth, anger and numbers."

​#endwriter

New maxim: Writing is its own reward. But music is dessert.

I've been writing content so long that I recognize the way it is often advantageous to be under the radar. You get clicked on by the algos and suddenly you are just another New Yorker or Vice writer.

Tijuana is instructive... it's a lil Philippines under Duterte deja vu, with more of an edge. Because this is a border city. Despite its indigenous industries, the way this city has sprawled and half-prospered is through being a conduit for whatever. People, ideas, sin, and excess. It is everything that San Ysidro is not. I live on a beautiful beach looking out toward a border that is still an aesthetically pleasing fence. One could swim around it, though stun-gun equipped drones would confront you in a heartbeat on the other side. On the stateside marshland side is a US-Mexico friendship park. The symbolic meaning of this is not lost on the local populace. People here know both countries, they are not clamoring at the gate.

If any place is Fabric, worth making part of an organic whole, it is Tijuana. Could spark conservation and ecologically sound urban planning that creates GNH-focused paradise here, redefine the heretofore unsustainable intersection between urbane and "developing."

Okay, enough about fabric, which I am told bores people. Changing the world is so antiquated.

I am also envisioning a novel Cowachunga that is Lord Of the Flies meets Barbarella. It is no longer set in Nevada (too close to aliens and military reservations), too much on the beaten path... the proper locale is Baja. ​I sketched out the plot yesterday while watching an incredible Super Bowl (first time I sit down to watch a game in a year and I get a classic that costs me 300 bones).

I've realized that the Cowachunga plot is now fairly solid in my mind. I am at a similar point I was with Arisugawa Park 7 years ago. with an impetus to write something original... only this time I see the indie movie version. And yah it may be another 7 years, because full time client-driven work does not synch with full time creative writing. If the publishing industry made its decision not to support "mid-list" writers, the end result is that we simply produce less over the course of a lifetime. I think I will have three books total in my life, barring the ability to concentrate on creative projects full time. The silver lining is that I (and my estate potentially) never have to share financially with those entities that would not support me when it counted. Any money that accrues can be used to launch a fabric platform.

Plot hints for crawlers and friendly bots:

Kyle is in Baja on a leading edge turquoise-phosphate-meteorite mission for his mysterious employer Frederick Vulcan. Dylan is an underground DJ who has unlocked a certain --- inducing sound that got him invited  to an exclusive DEAP (desert electronic-acoustic penetration) event. Kyle plays the tribal flute, that fits in as well. He is not me, but might as well include subjects with which I am intimately  familiar in any given plot. Saves research time.

QUIPS

• SO I just want to confirm... California also has right to defund Washington, right? cause it provides more in taxes etc. than it receives in federal funds, I am certain.

• Working on a new Fabric Dos song... "Primates With Guns"
.
• Regarding a brewing cultural debate over La La Land:

On the music side, I wouldn't call it a backlash per se... it just engendered debate, as jazz does and should. A vital music for breaking down barriers and enabling communication.  I see what the critics are saying, particularly those with a love for the music in all its manifestations. There is some really amazing stuff being made that blurs lines between traditional and the now; Ambrose Akinmusire, Robert Glasper, Dave Douglas, etc. At the same time to have the musical form respected within a contemporary movie to the point where I dug it and felt immersed is beyond rare. Almost nonexistent.

• I guess Trump will be perfectly fine with an #AdiosStarbucks boycott of Starbucks tho..... since they are a company that supports immigrants (and veterans). Funny how all the semi-responsible players pay for the dufus-in-chief's mistakes.

• A NY Times article Why Nobody Cares The President Is Lying by Charles J. Sykes (erstwhile conservative media pundit) explores how those conservatives who have been conditioned to accept lies will also benefit from ignoring reality because they believe such an approach can be used to implement policies that benefit them in a beggar-thy-neighbor way. Why bite the hand that feeds?

• I am trying to get my head around this paragraph in an illuminating NY Times article about the workings of Trumps inner circle:
"Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban."

​• Pieces of the puzzle fall in, department: The answer to the perplexing paragraph above is partially answered in the Jack Moore GQ article Donald Trump Is Signing Executive Orders That He Doesn’t Read or Understand.

My take: Is it too early to start talking about preventing a coup? Or has it been averted... the Super Bowl commercials may have been comforting, but that is the corporate machine. Lady Gaga, all appearances to the contrary, is not the President. Can Trump strike Bannon's name off the NSA leadership roles? Does he want to?

• Unnamed acquaintance of a friend commented on the Atlantic article "A Clarifying Moment in American History:"
​
'love these op-ed journalists who can only make a living by getting someone to publish their opinions and espouse the future as they see it. History will tell you the American citizens chose another path by not electing another career politician. They wanted things to change quickly and drastically, and it is. Either take your seat quietly on the boat and row in unison in support of the chosen new route we are on or jump overboard and swim to where you'

My reply:

The consensus on where the country should be headed is not set in stone. The world does not operate on "winner takes all" principles, no matter how much the current leader would wish it were so. Putting Andrew Jackson's portrait in the Oval Office does not make it so. Building casinos does not make it so. We have a system of checks and balances which Trump tried to circumvent. Now he is learning that he governs a country more complex than the group that put him in office. 

• Re: my friend Nil's fb comment on something to do with reasons why Hillary lost:

So you are saying that a) a "no Clinton" vote made sense from a certain perspective of wanting to fight entrenched power and that b) it is unfortunate that there was no truly viable candidate expressing common sense unifying interests for ordinary Americans (and humanity), such as Stein or Sanders?

• I don't often quote Bob Dylan, but when I do:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

How long before "Crooked Trump" becomes a thing?

#endwriter

And to end on a lighter note, as usual. 

• Got through Denmark and Belgium on the Trump troll videos and I've got to say.... Belgium, keep it classy.

Ok its official, Donye is over. And not a second too soon for sanity to prevail.  #travelban

Hiro-o, 6:50 am

David had a sense of life breaking against the shore in wave after pulsing wave, leaving in its wake an undertow that threatened to wash out signposts that kept him in suit and tie, tethered to the dubious practice of teaching conversational English. On the subway from Hiro-o to Monzen Nakacho––against the flow of Tokyo commute traffic––he realized that he felt a debt of gratitude to Eve for pulling him from the quicksand of the appointment-driven life. 

Having lost the ability to connect meaningfully with the opposite sex following his breakup, a warm body beside him typically reminded David of how much he missed Koharu's sensible presence. Eve had broken through all that somehow––closeness with her was an imperative, not a choice, and he been in Japan long to know that he could no more avoid what was destined than the weather. 

More to the point, developments of the past day had banished the dread he typically felt coming back from vacation to bursting-at-the-seams Tokyo––thrust in front of chafing-at-the-bit teenagers who expected him to provide the day’s dose of comic relief, even as he attempted sagacity. This at least tamed the old teaching ennui, put things in perspective. As temperamentally unsuited as he might be for pontificating in front of large groups, stage fright-induced anxiety was a luxury of the past.

Classes passed in a blur as David went through lessons that, in the best of circumstances, formed a murky bouillabaisse of knowledge in students’ heads. Which was not to say that what he taught did not have some subconscious effect––if these kids were spoiled, they were not unintelligent. The boys’ horseplay, centered around yanking loosened ties and ignoring him when it was their turn to speak, did not get a rise out of him. Nor did he admonish the girls who hiked their skirts as high as possible––as much to test limits as anything else.

Thoughts of Eve left concentration in tatters, even as he drilled students on how to make small talk in the office, at pro-Democracy rallies––it was amazing what he could slip past the homeroom teacher. Nominally in charge, old Yatsuuri had minimal English and even less interest in lessons––except as a sleeping aid.

During break he caught himself running his head through his hair and muttering to himself––if those in the teacher’s room noticed David’s odd behavior, they didn’t show it. There was no reason why they should. He was a foreigner, on the fringes of what was comprehensible. He would literally have to jump from desk to desk stark naked, whooping like a monkey and reciting the  preamble to the Constitution, for any of them to bat an eye. And even then... their reactions would be limited to a quizzical tilt of the head… another cup of tea? 

At lunch David slurped his way through a bowl of udon as his junior high school counterpart Darren recounted vacation exploits in logging-country Nanaimo. There was something smug in his expression, reflecting newfound pride to be from the world’s surrogate “land of the free.” David wondered how Eve was managing while he was away––still confined to the gaijin house he hoped, staying well out of sight. He had advised her against showing her face on the streets of Tokyo before they came up with a plan––problem was, no matter how hard he racked his brain, nothing resembling a plan came.

​#endwriter #AriPark