Tony Crunk, a colleague I’ve gotten to know over the last couple of years, has finally gotten online.

It’s long overdue, as he is in fact a poet you should know. His first book Living in the Resurrection won the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize in ’94. It is very, very good, one of those books that captures something in particular about a place in time. I’d say more, but it’s poetry, Sam Beckett & all that.

I’m on his back to include a selection of recipes. Why not? Until then we have his children’s books with readings. That should tide us over.

Visit his site, read samples of his work, listen to him doing some readings. There’s a really nice video interview linked on the “Railroad John” page where he’s talking about his childhood in the 270 before it was the 270, before one’s area code became a form of taxonomy. That vast expanse down near & past Hoptown, which I have never explored despite my best efforts, boasts towns with names like “Monkey’s Eyebrow,” “Cerulean,” and “Boaz.” And fair “Benton,” with its epic “Tater Day[s]” since 1843.

But not Birmingham. Birmingham’s under water. Oh, and that’s his new book on the upper left, which may or may not have anything to do with Birmingham. Get it!

Oursins in the garden:

Parallel with oursins on the map:

(From Luc Moullet’s “La Cabale des Oursins,” a favorite little film)

“Sea urchins,” naturally. Or unnaturally. The shape just naturally arises, unless you’ve got to make it yourself:

ABCDE, and thanks to NIPPaysage for the works in the first place.

Modern hairstyles

[Being a robo-translation of the entire hacking on a parked domain I'd forgotten I owned]

[emphasis mine]

If you are a fashionable bride and always adhere to, including at his own wedding, modern style, then offer you some advice on choosing and create a hairstyle for the wedding.

Grooming – it’s always playing with his mood and character. But the main thing that haircut on you “sit” (as a costume). For this simulation the master must take into account not only the type of face and hair structure, but also your lifestyle, and even in nature, so it’s important to reach an understanding between the client and the hairdresser. Always besproigryshen integrated approach: stylish, fashionable haircut, healthy appearance of hair, expertly chosen colors – all this will help preserve the natural appearance of your hair, but it is always dictated by fashion. Sophisticated, individual color haircut finishing touches to create an image, “traced” lines haircut, highlight its features and make the hair relief.

At the same time depends on the haircut and color selection. Simplifying this process does not make sense – a combination of different shades and technology creates a pleasant wonders. If you prefer to change the hairstyle, choose the average length: it has more features! Generally hairstyle visually can greatly change the shape of the head and face, to hide flaws and emphasize the merits. An experienced master could see all the nuances. It should listen to his advice and is not afraid to depart from traditional ideas. However, if radical measures in the shower, you do not agree, then the risk is not worth it. Grooming should be absolutely comfortable for you not only care, but also vospriyatiyu.Prinyato assume that the shearing is performed only on short hair. But you can take the form and long, making it easier stacking and will make them look original. Especially now in vogue hair of any length, provided they were healthy and well-groomed. And professionally manicured course.

Fashion democratic, and you can select any image, any option of color and haircuts – from avant-garde to the classics. Most importantly, your hair had distinctive features, was carried out professionally and correct the deficiencies of the exterior (and hair) by using color and shape, because as the French say, fashionable that is.

Master in the beauty salon may use different techniques haircut, and often the most interesting findings are derived from the connection of different styles and schools. In principle, there are a number of national schools of Hairdressing, using different systems. There are schools, German and Spanish, French and English. In each of them has its own terminology and principles, but on the finished hair and a specialist is not always easy to figure out what school a student will do it.

Varieties such as haircuts a bit. But the options for handling a particular hairstyle – hundreds. It was they who give the effect of identity. Curiously, recent experiments processing haircut in some unusual position, when the client, for example, strongly tilts his head and master of expressive, fast movements creates the effect of hair flying in all directions – no harm, of course, for a general form. In general, modern technology will help you quickly and easily change the image. For example, even when the length of the hair in the 5-7 cm by stacking can carry up to six options for hairstyles, which are completely transform the appearance. For ease of maintenance forms are styling so-called Sting, appearance and form of use is very reminiscent of solid deodorants. Suffice it several times to hold the hair – and create any form of hair, which will be held for several hours.

For people in the homeland, my friend Siobhan Byrns has a gallery show at the Loudoun House, an outpost of the Lexington Art League. I recommend it highly, not because she is my friend, but because she is a damn fine artist.

My friends who are not damn fine artists, I try not to talk about.

There will be grass~

The show’s at 209 Castlewood Drive in Lexington of the 859. Clicking on the lawn-wall takes you to their site, which, of course, has no map. So here’s a map. It can be easy to miss, so look for this:

Don’t stay past closing or the hauntings will get you.

Churches. Nicolas Bouvier’s travel book The Way of the World ends slipping away:

That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colors. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.

Leading up to the end, he combats it with moving on, tea, and people on the way. Stay a while, maybe not. His companion Thierry Vernet draws fleeting postcards of their trip from Serbia through Asia. Some hint at Matisse or set design just after the war. They’re all evocative, wonderful, just what you’d hope to find years later in your journals. Yet Vernet seems another void. Their rattletrap Fiat has more personality.

Bouvier wrote the book years later from journals and memories. One achievement’s in feeling like it unfolds in real time. Another’s that of a later man recalling himself at 24, yet just occasionally interrupting:

[Antoine] said to me, “Have you tried the Iranians? I have… they’re great.” The word “tried” discouraged me, so I left it at that. He has seen all of Europe, Russia and Persia too, but has refused to surrender an inch of his integrity. What a surprising programme! Maintaining his integrity — remaining intrinsically the same simpleton who first set out? He couldn’t have seen very much, then, because there isn’t a single country — as I now know — which doesn’t exact its pound of flesh.

I still think this is true. But now, when it’s just an ounce? I met a weary German ruefully telling of the rich American who’d bribed a border guard to “get into” Turkmenistan. Five bucks to hop off his motorcycle across the line, then he checked the next box and went back where he came from, triumphant.

Of course, travel doesn’t need a purpose. Most current travel books get mired in the writer’s head, or go policy wonking. Bouvier stays with appearances, like this face:

The book reaches its climax somewhere in Pakistan. They’re holed up in a desert town. And the cleaning boy throws out Nicolas’ manuscript. The one we’re reading? So he drags Thierry to an ancient garbage dump on a plain, where with spades and vultures in the heat of day, they dig. This scene hints at the scope of civilization, entropy, of humankind’s quest not to get picked to the bone by carrion-birds, or it just underscores its metaphors with shirts off and shovels for pens. He could wax lyrical; he skirts it to dig.

Let sleeping voids lie. Or just fill them with this:

Buy the Book

Tom Marioni left Cincinnati as a young man to do conceptual art in San Francisco. Then he wrote a memoir that ends (close to) here:

I don’t like to sound pedantic but I believe art is a poetic record of the culture with the power to inspire people to a spiritual awareness. I also think art represents the culture’s most excellent examples of visual ideas.

That’s pretty straightforward. I like it. Art’s spiritual and never transcendent. It’s always stuck in the mud it came from. Put differently: it always has its context. Marioni gently speaks to the context of each decade in the book. Say, the pendulum swing in contemporary art from the 70s to the 80s.

The book’s straightforward, too. It’s a pleasure to read such such a plain-spoken work from one of the more radical conceptual artists. He’s on Duchamp’s path, with curious installations and performances. Of late that’s the art school path, tenure and whatnot. For Marioni and his peers it was the opposite. He organized an alternative gallery, SF MOCA, and made a signature sound work by peeing in a bucket from a ladder. (With his back to the gallery crowd. Modesty enough to make the Queen City proud~ a paradox!)

So naturally he pranked the San Francisco Museum of Art as they looked for a director. After a year and a half, knowing they’d make a too-conservative choice, he sent out cards announcing he’d been appointed:

The art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Alfred Frankenstein, wrote that there ought to be a limit to the pranks that a Conceptual artist can pull. Twenty-six years later a collector bought one of the cards from me and gave it to the museum for its collection.

Circles, like the ones he draws. Marioni’s like the straight man in the book. His art’s the comic, only very very smart. His greatest work’s an ongoing beer salon on Wednesday nights. With rules like:

• Two-drink minimum: this means at least two.
• No beers in cans except Tecate.
• No smoking, except writers and cigar smokers.
• Leave the bathroom light on.

The book’s peppered with his drawings, cartoons really, of this and this: Guernica, his first car, Brancusi’s studio. Like the cover, they’re a delight.

(Over on his site you can download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue of his 2006 solo show at the CAC in Cincinnati, too, and sample his drawings, his installations, his video work)

Buy the book

When did selling people as sex slaves become “human trafficking?”  How awful it’s common enough to get its own euphemism.

Jake Adelstein uncovers the reality behind the euphemism in his memoir and expose, Tokyo Vice. He’s the only American ever to work as a beat reporter in Japanese, covering crime for the Yomiuri. It seems like a boring job if you just look at Japan’s crime rates. Adelstein’s hometown of St. Louis has about ten thousand times as many violent crimes as Tokyo with 1/12th the population. Yet the math might not favor Japan if it accounted for the underworld, sex industry, and corruption that goes up very high.

Tokyo Vice could be a Nikkatsu thriller if it were less human. The story’s a classic arc of lingering by the abyss.  Adelstein left for Japan twenty years ago to find enlightenment at a Buddhist temple, yet wound up reporting on prostitutes and crime in Tokyo.  He soon stumbled on a story about UCLA, a liver transplant and the FBI.  Which did not please the crime boss with a new liver.  The book’s a life insurance policy.  You can get a flavor for that whole world at his Japan Subculture Research Center, the most valuable online resource on Japanese crime.

And Tokyo Vice is remarkable for more than the story its breaks. It holds the arc of Adelstein’s life, one that’s impressive even if I wouldn’t choose it. He goes from a naive, invulnerable kid reporter to a wearied man who never sees his kids and might die on the job. The early moments when he’s impressed himself give way to regrets for the victims. It’s a far cry from the long tourism of travel lit, whether masterpieces like The Roads to Sata or compost like Learning to Bow.

However, compared to the travel lit, memoirs like this usually suffer. Living a life worth a book typically means you can’t write. (Travel writers actually don’t get out much.) Adelstein’s a journalist: problem solved. The book covers so much ground that on the first read you miss the grace notes, like his wearing the wrong suit to his job interview.  Black’s for funerals, silly.

And the travel lit, like much writing on Japan, misses the unraveling. Japan’s society has had a rough time of it lately, yet the official image still projects safety, family and middle-class comforts. Perhaps because most Westerners who’ve been to Japan of late get there by teaching English, a middle-class job if ever there was one, they only rarely glimpse the problems. In my own experience, the two actually brushed against one another.

I taught in Wakayama, where yakuza have been known. Fortunately, I have no story of skipping Taiji Town at 3 a.m. when my girlfriend let me know her dad was a local boss who’d just saved the date.  (Though I’ve heard a version of this, perhaps apocryphal.)

Instead I’ve got my coworkers’ arrest, on TV no less:

One of the "Blackmail Teachers" I sat next to at work

This still from the Fuji affiliate, fretting about the digital voice changer the “Kyoukatsu Kyoushi” used in an attempt at extortion. They repeatedly called their target, a principal across town, telling him to bring 30 million yen (about US$275,000 in ’04 rates) to a certain train station and don’t tell the cops! He told the cops. 100 times over two months they called, usually during smoke breaks at school.

Why? Debts. Who risks jail for debts? Whoever’s borrowed from the wrong people?

For as long as I followed the story, yakuza weren’t mentioned. They didn’t have to be. As Adelstein’s book makes clear, the profits in gambling, high-interest lending and finance have caught the yakuza’s eye. One chapter details a payday loan outfit that, for all intents and purposes, is just like the legit outfits. And these crimes are abstractions, hidden in ledgers and hard drives. So too “human trafficking.” The actual stories surface only on occasion, as they do in Tokyo Vice.  Read it already.

(& I should mention my friend Bo tipped me to the book; she’s thanked in the thanks, no doubt making me appreciate it more.  Actually no; it’s a great book)