An Interlude from Kurasic Park

Day 8, Tuesday, March 24 – Tokyo University

R left for Bali yesterday morning. He'll be back on April 4. Home alone until next Monday when CL flies in from Vancouver. I spent much of the afternoon sleeping and blogging. The jet lag comes in waves of opportunity during my schedule down times. Before I knew it, it was 6PM and I had to be at Tokyo University at 6:30. Kudo had invited me to a dance theater piece called "Bach/black and white" starring the legendary saxophonist and composer, Yasuaki Shimizu; the renown dancer, Setsuko Yamada; the beloved philosophy professor, Yasuo Kobayashi, and Kudo. I hightailed to the subway and got to the university in under twenty-five minutes. Even before the train arrived at the university, I sensed a change of scene and suddenly felt very much at home. I was among students and professors – universal types universally recognizable. But finding campus building #18 was a different matter. No one seemed to know where it was. Finally, someone did and I was standing right in front of it! 

Day 5 – Friday, March 20 – Hachiko

My mission today was to visit Konno Hachimangu, Shibuya's oldest Shinto shrine, and get a sense of where Kudo and I are performing on Sunday. I just heard that it's happening outdoors, so my other mission is to find a portable guitar amp for the flute. That may sound like an oxymoron, but the guitar effects, together with a Barcus Berry internal contact mic, is a thing of beauty: The Electric Flute! I'm going to try strapping a small amp to my body to give myself full mobility.

Day 4 – Thursday, March 19 – Art Fair Tokyo

The crows are a constant sonic companion. Once away from the traffic a bit, they are the loudest sound element in the city. What a strange counterpoint they provide the jet-lagged traveler vulnerable to macabre associations with other places and times. In the past few days, my being here has consisted mostly in fits and starts of sleeping and writing at odd hours, entirely in the confines of R’s house in Nakano. But yesterday afternoon, a different relationship to Tokyo unfolded. B, one of several great expatriate shakuhachi players in and around Tokyo, came up from Yokohama to retrieve a 1.8 尺八 that RS was returning to him via my formidable courier services. B, in turn, handed me another shakuhachi for RS to try out. This one got National Treasure, Goro Yamaguchi’s approval, before his unexpected death in 1999. B and I chatted for a while about shakuhachis. I demonstrated the Birdmachine, which I'd set up in my room earlier.

Transit from Hartford to Tokyo - Monday & Tuesday, March 16 & 17

The flight from Hartford was mostly an opportunity to get some desperately needed sleep. But right before we landed, approaching and then flying over the tip of Lake Huron, the landscape woke me up with a series cubist images in the style of Georges Braque... only to morph gradually into a Kasimir Malevich or Robert Ryman. Your choice of political kind of "white on white."