LOVING THE ALIEN

Not gonna lie: I’ve had a tough time during this extended trip, though there have been lots of rewards to it all. I arrived in Amsterdam 10:15 pm last night, but that’s local time, and this trip has accentuated how relative THAT is.

The 13-hour time-zone gap between Japan and EDT, in concert with my work schedule and travel exhaustion, pretty much cut me off from any communication back home. Combined with the isolation of being one of a seeming handful of non-Japanese people in the city of Urawa, and I was feeling pretty alienated and lost during my stay.

But the work went fine. I mentioned my presentation in the previous email; the next morning, I had a two-hour consultation/meeting with the board of the Japanese trade association that brought me out there, and that went very well. (They had two translators on hand, which made up for having zero translators the day before at my presentation.)

I felt like I’d earned my travel fare (they covered my airfare from home and on to Amsterdam, hotel, and the car service from Narita to Urawa), but once they all left for home, I had This Moment in a coffee shop, as the middle-aged ladies’ conversations blended into birdsong, where I understood that there wasn’t a single person in the entire city who had any idea who I was. I felt unstable and somehow erased, even though I was also a visual sore thumb, at 6’1”, in T-shirt & shorts, hair flowing, etc.

The only thing worse than this isolation was the utter revision I felt when I got to Tokyo on my final evening in Japan and saw so many white people. I contain multitudes of neurosis and anxiety.

That same night (Friday), as I sat in my room and fell farther into myself and ate a kebab bowl I picked up from a stand near the station, I felt the room start wobbling as if I was drunk. I thought it was even more disorientation from my burned-out state of mind, until I noticed that the Do Not Disturb sign hanging from my door was swaying. At which point I thought, “Oh, thank gosh, it’s just an earthquake.”

It was a pretty big one, but a ways north and ~30 miles out to sea, so all we experienced in Urawa was a 1 on the intensity scale.

LUCKY FOR ME, there was a podcast to record. Listener and Instagram follower Philip Ebbrell turned me on to the artist and designer Luis Mendo, who lives in Karuizawa, about an hour or so north of Urawa by train. We spent a chunk of Saturday together, mainlining megadoses of each other’s lives and becoming new old friends. (Got to meet his wife and daughter, too, which was a blast.)

I felt pretty blissed out by this communion while on my train back to Tokyo, and was thankful to have this mission.

(I would edit and post the podcast today, but JFC I could use a goddamned rest, so that’ll be next week’s episode, okay?)

The next morning, in the only time I had in Tokyo, I repeated my Feb. 2020 5k run around the Imperial Palace grounds — 9:25/mi, which is 25 sec/mile worse than 2020, but I’m 15-20 lbs. heavier and 6 years older — which made me feel like a champ.

I tried to navigate the subway to get to Haneda for my 14-hr. flight out, and a Japanese mom with two toddlers very kindly told me when I’d need to get off the current train and pick up the other line (because Apple Maps wasn’t clear about that). After days of erasure and self-derived alienation, I melted at that act of recognition and kindness. Even if she apologized repeatedly for intruding on my anxiety-laden self-regard.

Listen: there’s a lot else, but I just can’t go into it all, esp. while I’m still parsing through everything and have another week ahead of me. Like I said, it’s been tough, and there have been blessings, and I have a morning to breathe in one of the funniest hotel room setups I’ve ever had, but soon I have to check out and get back to work.

Recent podcast episodes: Benoit Denizet-Lewis • Clare Carlisle • Josh Alan Friedman • Andrew Durbin • Dean Haspiel & Doug Latino • Rachel Tzvia Back • Sven Birkerts

Every book (non-comics) that I’ve finished since 1989.

BIRDY!

Amy hasn’t sent any BIRDY! pictures while I’ve been on the road, so nothing for you guys this time; sorry!

HITTING THE LINKS

But hey, more links:

• RIP Joe Sedelmaier . . . RIP Frank Stack [and hey, obit-writer, maybe don’t make puritanical digressions about Robert Crumb in someone else’s obit?]

• I liked Lindsey Adler’s aporia and recognition of self in her late 30s reading of Stoner. I feared . . . something different from the essay, and was pleasantly surprised.

• Josh Gondelman’s satirical skewering of the looksmaxxxxxxxxing cult is the funniest thing I’ve read in quite a while. It also occurred to me that all these dolts sound like the narrator of one of Mark Leyner’s pieces from My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.

• This new mag about artists and their process sure sounds a lot like Adam Moss’ great book, The Work of Art, but I’m all for anything that promotes art, culture, etc., as you’re well aware.

• I have seen Amor Towles’ rare books library and it truly is All That.

• The Great Chain of Pod — Amor studied with Peter Matthiessen, whose PULITZER-FINALIST (!!) phenomenal biography, True Nature, was written by Lance Richardson — dictates I let you know about Lance’s piece on John McPhee.

INSTAX

I took a few Instax pix at Luis’ on Saturday. Or should I say Caturday:

WATCH-LIST

I watched a couple movies on my laptop during my flights:

• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - not as good as the miniseries, but it had one of the greatest male British casts of recent vintage: Oldman, Firth, Jones, Hinds, Hardy, Cumberbatch, Stong, Graham, McBurney, and oh, yeah JOHN HURT.

• Hail, Caesar! - gets better every time I watch it; funny how the “minor” Coen Bros. flicks do that.

• Moonrise Kingdom - when David Denby praised this one during our talk last year, I thought I should give it another shot, and I liked it more this time, and was less disbelieving of the relationship between the two kids, given their looks-disparity; also caught a lot more of the cinematic references and such that populate the movie. Also, “I love you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

• Paths of Glory - JMFC, this was one of the most incredible movies I’ve ever seen and I’m embarrassed it took me this long to get to it.

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be on my list.

EXPENSES

If you want to help out with Virtual Memories Show expenses — this email runs $29/month, podcast-hosting is $25/month, and the remote recording account is $20/month — or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can make a one-time contribution of any size via Stripe, or a recurring one via Patreon. Or maybe save your money for when I launch the Kickstarter for my Instax book.

NEXT TIME

Thanks for reading this far. See you next time, I hope.

My, my, the time do fly when it’s in another pair of hands / And a loser I will be, for I’ve never been a winner in my life / I got used to stressing pain, I used the sucker pills to pity for the self / Oh, it’s the animal in me, but I’d rather be a beggar man on the shelf,