3/29/2006 09:44:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|
Fight Club
Fight Club,
originally uploaded by maggie loves hopey.

|W|P|114363624149049596|W|P|They Ignored The First Rule|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/26/2006 10:19:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|Sorry. This may be connected to my discovery of a cable channel called Samurai TV, which shows nothing but samurai dramas. That, and playing We Love Katamari... The cherry blossom is beginning to appear. The trees at the end of the road by the hospital are almost in full bloom, so yesterday we took a walk to Aoyama cemetary (passing the Ice Bar on the way) to see some more. My not so latent goth tendencies mean I like graveyards anyway, but this was particularly cool. There's a foreigner section there, which seems to be mostly the graves of missionaries who died in Japan at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century. Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, and more. When they were alive they were probably squabbling over who got to recruit the heathens to whatever particular subsect of Christianity they subscribed to, but a century later they're laid next to each other, and life goes on around and above them oblivious of such theological dispute. The blossom was out, a few people were picnicking among the tombstones, and the whole vibe was peaceful and relaxed. A few hours later we were at Shibuya crossing (the one Scarlett Johansson watches from Starbucks in Lost In Translation) and it was like a different planet. Bought a new camera today, so expect a load more photos to appear on Flickr soon. I just uploaded another batch, mostly from Ueno Park Zoo, including some rather excellent monkeys, and a few of the aforementioned cemetary blossom.|W|P|114338045182856277|W|P|Ten Days Since My Last Post?|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/16/2006 07:26:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|Highlights of the strange and unusual things we have seen since arriving A toy doll of Osama Bin Laden with his pants down that blew soap bubbles out of his arse. Venus Fort, an indoor shopping mall designed to resemble an eighteenth century Italian town, complete with fake sky projected on the roof that goes through a day/night cycle every couple of hours. Another shopping mall, where one of the floors is a recreation of Hong Kong in the 1960s. Why? Nobody knows. A shop full of vending machines selling all kinds of toys, from little robots to cute creatures for kids to what can only be described as naked schoolgirls. A baby’s dummy shaped like a penis. Wrong on so many levels. Loads and loads of tiny dogs in coats and with ribbons in their hair. It is like living in Nintendogs. A restaurant where you order your food by machine, but are served by humans. The Asahi BEER ROBOT. Maybe the greatest thing I have ever seen in my life. Japanese women insisting on wearing knee high boots with heels, despite the fact that none of them can walk properly in them and roll from side to side like an old sailor who cannot adjust to be being on land. An almost full size replica of the interior of the International Space Station signed by Buzz Aldrin. Pretty much anything on Japanese MTV. I am blogging to:|W|P|114250506259171427|W|P|Japan: The Edited Highlights|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/14/2006 08:53:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|This is the kind of internet social networking site I like. I am blogging to: Richmond Fontaine|W|P|114233735257139511|W|P|Don't Like MySpace?|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/09/2006 10:36:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P||W|P|114191140098804146|W|P|Join Us!|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/10/2006 04:14:00 AM|W|P|Anonymous Anonymous|W|P|you always were a muso-fascist.3/08/2006 08:51:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|We started our Japanese lessons. So far, I can't say much more than "My name is Dan" and "I am not an American". You know the theory that Japanese post war cinema was so obsessed with giant dinosaurs smashing up Tokyo because it expressed something in the Japanese psyche that had been formed by enduring millenia of earthquakes and typhoons, and then becoming the only nation to have an atomic bomb dropped on it? Well, unless I've misunderstood my grammar book, the language has no future tense. Present and past is all they have. The moral of this story is that there's no point planning ahead when you could get crushed by a giant radioactive dinosaur at any minute. I am blogging to: Two Gallants|W|P|114181895230496666|W|P|Future. Tense.|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/07/2006 07:13:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|The Nexus 6 models have escaped I am blogging to:|W|P|114172647266850190|W|P|Philip K Dick Robot Update|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/05/2006 08:55:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|(stolen from the Holy Moly mailout) Google Image search for "Tiananmen Square" Google China Image search for "Tiananmen Square"|W|P|114155988140726581|W|P|Tanks? What Tanks?|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/05/2006 11:31:00 PM|W|P|Blogger Marcus|W|P|urm you do know that Boing Boing mentioned this over a month ago?



Mind you, you have been a bit busy ;)3/06/2006 08:53:00 PM|W|P|Blogger dan|W|P|I knew about the whole Google/China censorship business a while ago, but that was the first pictorial representations I saw. Out of touch innit. In other news I have broken my audioscrobbler after a weekend of fighting iTunes, so last.fm may be a bit behind the times3/06/2006 10:04:00 PM|W|P|Blogger Marcus|W|P|urm well I have finally fixed (ok I installed a later version of my music player Amarok) iPod syncing under Linux, so don't boot into windows anymore, so the only advice I could give would be.......


:)3/07/2006 07:06:00 PM|W|P|Blogger Sizemore|W|P|yeah yeah tanks are pretty... but go read this:

http://www.londonist.com/archives/2006/03/wonder_london_f.php

Any chance you can find a copy for me?

I will swap you for a bag of British fish n chips and a copy of the Daily Mail.

If you can't get me a copy I'll just send the Daily Mail.3/03/2006 08:44:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|When I go out to get a coffee at lunchtime, I walk a narrow path up the hill to Roppongi-dori. Off to one side, just a stone’s throw from the expats, bar girls and neon flash is a small graveyard behind a chain link fence. This isn’t the quiet contemplative charm of an English country churchyard, but a very urban place for death, carved out of the city. The gravestones are packed close together (I suppose they cremate their dead, or bury them standing) and all of a uniform slate grey colour. The only concessions to nature here are a meager fringe of trees around the borders and the small splashes of colour from the flowers left on the graves. The stones are taller than ours, head high, and arranged tightly together with a grid of small paths leading between them. Each stone holds a few wooden poles inscribed with kanji (prayers?). From a distance they look like nothing so much as a scale model of a major modern city, all skyscrapers, scaffolding and roads. A true necropolis. I am blogging to:Calla|W|P|114138636805070822|W|P|City Of The Dead|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com3/03/2006 09:50:00 PM|W|P|Blogger Marcus|W|P|That's very poetic of you Dan.

Japan obviously bringing out your inner yogurt weaver3/01/2006 10:04:00 PM|W|P|dan|W|P|Last weekend we went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum Of Photography, which we pretty much just stumbled across on a wander through Ebisu. It was a good thing we did. The current exhibition is a collection of the award winning works from the 2005 Japan Media Arts Festival, and some of it was just brilliant. The fun part was the Entertainment section, which was a load of last year's best games (Nintendogs, Shadow Of The Colossus,etc) and manga, but some of the really interesting stuff was in the Art section. The Khronos Projector was a standout. An elasticised screen reacts to your touch, flowers bloom and rotting melons recompose themselves. Click on the link, ignore the phrases like "spatio-temporal fusion algorithm" and hope you get to play with one. Six String Sonics reinvents the six string guitar as six single-stringed guitars, played by six different musicians. I'd like to see Jon Bon Jovi walk these streets with a loaded set of those on his back. Maybe the most fun was "Virtual Brownies". Clever, childlike, and oddly reminiscent of the Tetley teafolk. Another exhibit used stereoscopy to produce a convincingly three dimensional version of a Vermeer painting. Neil Gaiman linked to this guy. He has an intersting routine there. Maybe I should see if his next mission is to go for a drink... I am blogging to: Marah|W|P|114121974278820526|W|P|Art and stuff like that|W|P|danpawley@gmail.com