Girl of the Falling Planets,

I’ve written a lot of love poems.  This one is kind of a love poem for Japan or, more specifically, Tokyo.  It is seductive and full of secrets . . . like a woman.  It is probably a metaphor that would perplex most Japanese ñ a very male-dominated society.  The women I spoke to in Japan seemed sadly resigned to, at some point in their lives, becoming part of a man’s life as almost chattel.  Some of the young women, who worked at the hotel I stayed at, told me that their mothers and their fathers encouraged them to find a man, rather than pursue an education or a business of their own.  The encouraging thing in these conversations was that the women bristled at these thoughts.  One young woman, Sayaka, made it clear that her parents were going to have to realize that it was a new Japan; that the cultural revolution, acted out between young and old, had already happened, albeit quietly.  The young men did not desire to be salary-men and the young women wanted lives, careers and businesses of their own.  It is ironic to view this very old culture and think it has taken this long for young women to liberate themselves from old patriarchal customs and expectations.  Of course, many young women in Japan looked to American women as symbolic of the empowerment one can achieve in the new Japan.  The image of the passive and quiet Asian woman is a quickly disappearing stereotype.

In Japanese art there is no small amount of erotic content; the woodcuts and paintings of artists like Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi are full of geishas and courtesans.  Manga is full of some of the most brutal porn you’ll ever see, replete with rape-fantasy storylines that are degrading and sadly very common.  For centuries, women have very often been sex objects in Japanese art.  There are young women artists in Japan who are turning these paradigms on their head.  Mariko Mori, who seamlessly cobbles together Eastern myths and Western cultural motifs, often makes videos and photographs using herself, more often than not, as a goddess.  Work like hers points to a newly realized “Girl Power” that emboldens other young women artists.  She is a big deal–a real role model to young Japanese women . . . a woman in control of her own art and her own image . . . a woman who owns herself.

I also found out that the cherry blossom season of spring in Japan is a time when many young men propose marriage.  It is a beautiful time of year when the blossoms are in full roar and the parks are full of bright, gauzy whites and pinks, plum wine and music.  It is a lovely thing in a lovely city.  This one is for Tokyo.

The White Lodge

As a kid, I remember seeing cars and trucks with dead deer lashed to them in autumn.  Deer Season.  The men in our neighborhood would go up to Wisconsin or Northern Illinois and hunt whitetail deer.   The argument was always that without a certain amount of thinning the herd, the deer would starve during the winter, which seems a logical premise.  People ate the venison they harvested throughout the winter.  It was healthy, low-fat meat that was plentiful.

Still, it bugged me. The killing of deer seemed ugly.  Or shooting birds.  I never liked the idea  of it.  I’ve eaten plenty of venison and have liked it, but I don’t think I could ever look through a scope and pull the trigger on a deer.  It seems like a sin, like something that should be a crime.  I see them once in a while, walking placidly across a field out by the airport or on a ride up to Wisconsin, and they seem more mythic as I get older; more poetic. . .more like something to protect rather than bust a cap in.

I am not squeamish about guns.  I’m a firm believer in the right to bear and keep arms.  I am very pro Second Amendment . Hunting does not even bother me so much, though I choose not to do it.

Crazy Horse hunted buffalo with a bow and arrow.  Now, piss off a fully grown buffalo and watch how fast he stomps a mud-hole in your ass.  He also hunted antelope, deer and elk, all of them formidable creatures when wounded.

Often, roving groups of shit-heads hunt wolves from helicopters, with high-powered rifles, or hunt quail (which are about the size of a feather-duster and about as ferocious) with shot-guns on game farms, like Dick Cheney.

These tools are not without their comic value though.  At least once a year, a story surfaces that one of these Bwana-types gets snot-flying drunk and, despite the orange vest, blows the brains out of one of the other he-men in his hunting party.  Oops.  I often wonder if it is a cock-size thing that makes grown men go out and blast ducks out of the sky.  Really. . .what for?  Though I agree with Ted Nugent on the Second Amendment, I despair at the endless photos of him with some magnificent animal he has just killed.  To take this much joy in killing is psychotic.

At one time hunting to eat made sense.  Now hunting just seems to be an exercise in cruelty.

The Black Petals

There is a lovely flower store across the street from my studio called Larkspur.  My friend, Beth Barnett, owns it.  Sometimes when it is gray and shitty in Chicago, which is about eight months a year, I go over there and marvel at the color and smell of her daily inventory of flowers and plants . . . it is one of those pleasures that I live for.  She has things other stores don’t–anemones, Vanda orchids, Calathea plants–the stuff nobody else much cares about.  This store is a revelation; it always cheers me up.  I bought a Calathea plant there last week because I wanted to draw its black and purplish leaves.  It is from Brazil and is often a mourning plant, a plant given at times of death, much like the Irish giving lilies.  I thought it perfect for the mournful and autumnal life of Crazy Horse.  Black petals as deep and rich as crude oil, or night in the Badlands.  Calathea does not grow within 2,000 miles of the Black Hills, yet somehow, it is fitting.

I was in New Orleans last week where everything grows and overgrows; flora and fauna incessantly trying to reclaim the place.  I was there for these panels sponsored by Louisiana Artworks, speaking to young (and some not so young) artists about how to enter the world as artists.  I became acquainted with some wonderful emerging talent that really deserves a bigger audience.  I was touched at how, in the middle of the shittiest art-economy I can remember, these kids were full of optimism, energy and desire, how they evince an undefeated kind of spirit in the face of no small amount of adversity.

I came back to a Chicago in the full thrall of autumn with the trees and bushes changing colors; gorgeous fiery yellows and russet reds, burnt ochres and umbers and oranges.  This city is never more beautiful than in the fall.  Soon it will be time to turn the clock back and it will be dark at 4:30 in the afternoon, which will bum me out.  I don’t get Daylight Savings.  What the fuck are we saving it for?  Autumn is sad in the same way finishing a good book is, you don’t want it to end.  Winter is cruel in Chicago and at times it is easy to believe that cruelty is the true nature of this city’s heart . . . it can be a heartless motherfucker.

The Snake Planets

I love snakes.  As a kid, I had many boas, corn snakes, fox snakes, and once a speckled king snake that was as beautiful and lithe as yellow-dotted fine silk.  It was truly lovely.  I love drawing snakes as they are kind of one fluid line that curls and loops, never achieving an actual angle. Snake lines just kind of walk around on the picture-plane.

I worked in a pet shop in high school that dealt largely in exotic reptiles.  The guys who ran this place were also collectors of reptiles and falconers.  They were fascinating guys who knew a lot about nature and natural history.  They were especially adept at getting rare, barely-legal kinds of reptiles, including rear-fanged poisonous snakes and odd specimens like the Spilotes snake, which was a gorgeous black, yellow and white, and crazy-fast.  He was also a very big (six feet) and ill-tempered motherfucker.  This pet store was a wonder to me.  We got ferocious monitor lizards, as well as gentle chuckwallas and iguanas, one of which grew to be five feet long.  For me, though, the snakes were the treat.  KWI Pets got everything from reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons and rosy boa constrictors to shimmering black Indigo snakes that moved like liquid poetry.  It was a great place to work.

There is much lore surrounding snakes in Native American culture.  They are harbingers of storms, earthquakes and floods, as well as an ominous symbol of the near proximity of enemies.  It is a bad foreshadowing of things to come if one senses that the snakes are angry.  The lowly snake is able to feel the earth with its belly and is, therefore, a powerful spirit.  Horses are scared shitless of them . . . the snake is a powerful talisman.

Years ago I traveled the West and came upon a diner in Wyoming that had a tank full of prairie rattlers outside of it; big heavy-bodied, sons-of-bitches who love-you-not.  I thought they were SO boss, this glass box full of godless, undulating, death writhing in red dirt.

Ever since Christianity put the stink on snakes, they’ve been a symbol of the outlaw, the sexual, the other.  What I always loved about them as a kid was that they scared the shit out of everyone.  I used to taunt little girls with garter snakes that I’d caught.  One day I found a girl who was not the least bit scared of snakes–Kim Florence.  We were in fifth grade and she had more snakes than I did.  Naturally, I fell madly in fifth grade love with her; she was my first girlfriend.  She later kissed me off for a boy with dirty hair and a guitar, but my love for snakes and their dangerous kind of cool went unabated.

In Texas every year, a bunch of fucking Neanderthals get together and kill rattlesnakes by the thousands, even though they are among the most useful of creatures eating mice, rats, gophers and even other snakes.

Many Native American tribes have “Snake-Dances” that celebrate the power and mystery of these amazing creatures.

Winter Crosses

Winter in the Badlands is, to say the least, formidable. The wind, hail, snow and freezing-sideways-rain can create a whiteout in seconds.  It is one of those landscapes where nature truly has the ass over you.  When he was alive, Crazy Horse used the unpredictability of nature and the vagaries of landscape to his advantage in warfare and hunting.  He knew where his enemy and his prey would be in any given weather because he knew what the land knew.  Winter made hunting easier because the deer, antelope and buffalo had nowhere to hide and had to move constantly to forage for food.  Winter was also very hard on the tribes of Native Americans.  Water would freeze, fires would have to be kept perpetually burning in order to stay alive, which would in turn alert enemies as to their location.  It was a perilous time of year for man and animal.

The cross motif present in much Native American art is not Christian, it represents the four directions, or the four winds, as my friend Mark Turcotte told me.  Mark is the great Chippewa poet I’ve known for years who has been a huge help in directing me toward what to read and look for when making these offerings.  I’d been perplexed by the presence of so many crosses and had thought that maybe this element had been introduced by missionaries before they aided in the systematic attempted genocide of the American Indian tribes.  As far as we know, Crazy Horse’s deities were rooted in nature.  Like many Native American tribes, he regarded the sun as the Almighty.

In battle Crazy Horse adorned his forehead with three hailstones and red lightning bolts on each cheek.  He also carried a small pebble or hailstone behind his ear.  These images were powerful talismans in his life and visions.  When it would hail, the Native American believed it was raining stone and, depending which text you read, this was alternately ominous and hopeful at the same time.

Natural phenomenon is almost always present in Native American art and textiles; weavings and blankets and rugs and bold patterns that reflect the temperaments and shapes of landscape and seasonal shifts.

The last time I was in the Badlands, I was aware of nature as a presence, as an entity.  It is a powerful place charged with our most shameful histories, those sad resolutions of tribal fates that have forever etched regret into our American psyche.

The Deer Music

In Larry McMurtry’s splendid Crazy Horse, the author does something really smart, he measures what Crazy Horse means to his people and to us as Americans.  Little is known about Crazy Horse, despite the iconic presence he is.  McMurtry does not indulge any speculative history; rather than this, he carefully crafts an enigmatic and towering definition of who Crazy Horse became in history’s wider lens.  Instead of perpetuating the myth-writ-large, McMurtry, with the skill of a surgeon, explains our complicated history with the legacy of this odd man.  I’ve always admired McMurtry’s writing and while I was never much interested in Western things before or Texas so much, Lonesome Dove changed all of that for me and I became a rabid fan of Mr. McMurtry’s novels.

One of my aims in making these meditations on Crazy Horse is not to convince you I know a lot about Native American History or Native Americans.  I don’t.  I am a white guy who is fascinated by the problematic history and wanderings of one iconic Native American, Crazy Horse.  He was an odd man who was not very comfortable as a leader, or a member of a tribe, or even as a man.  He was a seeker of spirits, of nature, which are pretty much the same thing in this particular body of work.  Do I feel a kinship with him?  Not really.  He was at heart a loner, happy out wandering in nature, hunting deer, elk and buffalo, sleeping in caves and under the stars.  I am an admirer of his courage and otherworldliness.  I feel greatly for those who will only be like themselves.

The Spider Music

When my daughter Gaby was small, I used to read her my favorite children’s book, Charlotte’s Web. it was a gorgeous allegory about right and wrong by E. B. White.  It gently explained the mystery of the life-cycle without all of the punitive religious horse-shit.  Charlotte’s legacy were a hundred little parachutes with her babies tethered to the end of them with silken threads.  Charlotte is alive through her children and the kind lessons she bestowed upon her friends in the barn-yard.

I am still kind of a pussy about spiders, but I don’t immediately kill them like I used to.  Now I sweep them out of whatever place I am inhabiting, but I don’t stomp on the poor fuckers like I used to.  Spiders are among the most useful of creatures; eating flies, mosquitoes, nits, centipedes and other harmful bugs.  Still, they give me the willies; especially the big fuckers–they still spook me.

In Japan, of course, spiders are looked on with favor, as useful makers of silk-like thread and as nature’s artists. Much Japanese art references the glistening geometry of spider-webs.  It appeals to the Japanese sense of elegant order.  All through the wood-cuts and etchings of Hiroshige and Hokusai there are hints of spiders and their webs as benevolent elements.  In haiku, Issa, Buson and Basho all write of spiders and the rigorous mathematical poetry of their webs.

My friend, Steve Earle, told me a couple of years ago that after reading a lot of haiku that he didn’t want to kill things anymore.  He used to hunt deer and fish for trout for eating.  Now he is content to merely humiliate the cutthroat trout he catches and lets them go.  After visiting Japan and reading a lot of Japanese poetry, the reverence for life is something I share.  I don’t want to kill anything either.  In New Orleans recently I let a cockroach saunter by me without stomping his ass.  He was a big motherfucker and he walked by with no urgency.  It was if he were daring me, like, “Hey….Want some of this?”   In New Orleans, they want to pretend cockroaches are something else, so they call them pretty names like “palmetto bugs” or the banal “waterbug.”  Bullshit.  They are cockroaches. Granted, they are the size of a Buick and they fly, but they are still fucking ROACHES.

And I still have no desire to kill them anymore.

And this is something.

The Yellow River

Do you not see the waters of the Yellow River
Come flowing from the sky?
The swift stream pours into the sea and returns never-more? – Li Po,  An Exhortation

Li Po liked to get hammered on wine and write poems.  His “Exhortations” (there were many) find their modern counterpart in poems like Baudelaire’s Get Drunk, in which the poets celebrate life’s rich bounty of wine, words and love.  Li Po was not adverse to what he called “reckless revelry,” which is not to say he was not serious about anything.  He was very devoted to  nature and would tear up at the sight of the constellations.  He was a sensualist and spent many days and years by rivers and under the stars.  He was in awe of all of it.  In his poems, he would state, “We never grow tired of each other, the stars and I.”

I’ve not spent a lot of time in nature and lately I’ve had a desire to be by the river or the lake.  I like watching birds and in Tokyo, I really loved watching the whir of carp and koi and goldfish in the ponds in the public parks.  Tokyo still  looms large in my thoughts and day-dreams.  I want to go back.  I miss it; much the way I miss New Orleans when I’m not there.  It is a dream-city full of color and blinding imagery and light.  It is an urban reliquary as much of the imagination as it is a city  of order and clock-like efficiency.  I love the way the Japanese blend images and words  and architecture and light.

There is a stretch of subterranean business district called “Piss Alley” (named so because at one time they all shared the same restroom) filled with bars, restaurants, clip-joints and bazaar-like shops that is so dizzying in its claustrophobic stalls and stores, it feels like an above ground river of human excess and activity.  It is hypnotic.  Like the rest of Tokyo, it is dreamy and exotic in its otherness. The kind of place I’m very comfortable.

I love places that challenge what I  know.  Places where I shut up and look and listen and let it teach me their rhythms and sounds and colors. Tokyo is a quiet city for one as large as it is; hell, for any city.  It is odd and wonderful to me, and I want badly to go back.

I like its quiet kindness and inescapable poetry.  It has connected me with an instinct to seek a kind of peace with myself.

Koi for Li-Po

Li Po has been the best known Chinese poet in  Asia for about the last thousand years.  He was a huge influence on the haiku poets — and is credited with being the seminal influence in the language of Tanka and Haiku.  He was one of those wandering, searching poets who worshipped nature. He was so great a poet that there are volumes of poems by other poets proclaiming their devotion to him:

Today I laid bare before you
all things stored in my heart.

are the final lines from an anonymous poet in a verse dedicated to Li Po.  His poems are like an electrified arcing kite-string connecting him and Basho to modernist poets like Ezra Pound who was profoundly influenced by  the writings of the Chinese poets of the 6th and 7th centuries, but in particular, Li Po.

One must remember that Li Po was a poet of what was considered the cultural age of enlightenment in China; the 300 years or so that constituted the Tang Dynasty.  The greatist artistic attainments of this age were poetry.  There were no plawrights or novelists; only poets; and  there were poets up the wazoo.  As the quote goes, “If there was a man, he was a poet.” The Chinese  held poetry in very high regard, and Li Po was the best of the best back then. When one reads Basho, one cannot help but realize the restraint and acuity of Li-Po hovering over the totality of Basho’s output.  That one was Japanese and one Chinese and separated by a thousand years does not deter the idea of these two spirits being distant mirrors of the other.

My friend Beth Keegan taught Chinese for years at the Latin School and she is forever correcting me on the pronunciation of Li Po’s name.  She pronounces it “Li BOUGH” and ennunciates the second syllable as if it were two.  Those who revere Chinese writing are very protective of it. After reading Li Po, I  get it.  It is a cultural treasure; one largely forgotten and one that, regrettably, nobody gives a fuck about anymore.  It’s a shame.  There is such joy and earthy gratitude in Li Po’s, “To Tung Tsao-Chiu:”

And comlier still are the green eyebrows when the new
moon shines.
The  beautiful girls sing anew and dance in robes of thin silk.

Li Po liked a good time.  After writing a letter in which this verse appears, he “sends it a thousand miles, and years, remembering.”  It is lines like this that make me feel alive.

The Hungry Ghost

When you look into the ponds found in many Japanese parks and shrines there are always koi and carp.  From time to time you’ll spot an almost translucent white carp, an albino of sorts, gliding like an aquatic white ghost.  Japan and Asia, for that matter, are fairly lousy with ghosts.  One of the most haunting spook stories is that of “The Hungry Ghost.”  It pops up in Thai, Chinese and Japanese folk-tales and ghost stories.  It goes that if one has led an unscrupulous life, he, or she, is doomed in the after-life to roam the world as a hungry ghost for 800 years.  The Ghost is said to have a mouth so small that no food can fit in it.  I’ve heard this story, or variants of it, many times.  To wander, hungry, is thought to be the worst of fates.  Perhaps this is because, all over Asia, starvation is a very real-world problem.  In all of these folk-tales and parables, hunger is akin to madness.

Tokyo has made an impression on me.  It is another world that lingers in the imagination long after one returns home.  The ease with which I was able to navigate Tokyo was a surprise to me, as well as the feeling of comfort while wandering that city.  It is good to get away from one’s landscape.  To experience new sights and sounds and ways of living is a great blessing.  I spent years making work about the wonder of my own city and now it is time to let the rest of the world into my work.  I’ve thought long and hard about just what it is I want, and the simple truth of it is, I don’t want much of anything.  I pretty much have what I want.  What I’d like now is to spend my  money and time on experiences rather than “stuff’.”  I want to see more of the world and get out of  my land-locked existence as an American.  We often just see the world through our own myopic scrim and when we view ourselves from another country, our whole picture becomes exponentially more visible.  We wonder why other countries fear and distrust us, but when you view the U.S. from Asia or the U.K., we look awfully big and reckless.  I’m always  curious to know what America means to the rest of the world and very often, we are an enigma to foreigners in their countries.

I’ve never been treated with anything other than kindness when I’ve traveled to other countries.  People are curious about us.  They do tend to think we’re all rich, which is kind of funny, but by and large, most of the people I meet are surprised that Americans are as nice as we are.  Given what they see of our government’s policies, I understand this.

The Black Carp

Carp are sacred in Japan.  My friend, Duncan, told me of one that was a gift from a 17th century Emperor.  It lived for 250 years.  They are hardy fuckers; eating and drawing sustenance from all manner of shit, garbage, and aquatic detritus.  Frogs, minnows, paper-bags, pretzels, and any other gunk that falls in the water, all ring the dinner bell for carp.  It is the very definition of a garbage fish, yet they are beautiful and fleet in the water, growing as large as their environment will let them.   They have been a mainstay of Japanese art and literature since the beginning of the written and painted  story.

My dog, Chooch, is kind of like a carp.  He eats whatever falls on the floor.   He was an orphan stray when I got him, eating from the garbage and starving when he was delivered to PAWS.  He is a tough little bastard who found a way to survive, just like a carp.  When lakes get polluted and all over the other fish go tits-up, not the scrappy carp.  In fact they thrive.  Most wildlife agencies consider the carp an “invasive” species meaning they wreck the aquatic neighborhood for the sexier fish like trout and  perch.  In the U.S., carp are considered inedible.  In Asia, they are heavily fished as a food-stuff.  I know guys down south who make carp-balls and swear they’re good.  I guess if you deep-fry anything with enough cornmeal and spices, it will become palatable.
Though a freshwater fish, every once in a while, someone catches one in the ocean.  There are stories of the ever-adaptable carp surviving saltwater.

Goldfish are basically carp, as are koi, which are the pretty carp and highly prized as ornamental accoutrements for ponds in Asia and Europe.  In Europe, fisherman love them because they are an intensely hard fish to hook and once you hook them, you have to fight the fuckers.  They do not go quietly off of this mortal coil.  They live for as long is there is  a steady food supply.  Despite being a universally maligned fish, they are found in the art of almost every culture, including ours.

The MCA in Chicago had a koi pond in their downstairs space.  Years ago, I had my exhibition of the alphabet etchings there and opening day was a family day where every swinging-dick in the city who had kids showed up.  One little boy climbed into the koi fountain and took a shit; much to the delight of the koi and several onlookers.  Nice of the tyke to serve the koi a hot meal.

In Japan, the carp move like a fleet, sad song under the water; drifting to the top when visitors appear to mooch food.  They put their mouths to the very surface and make a sucking sound that is to say the least, disquieting.  They have remarkably amiable personalities and are a whir of indecipherable oranges, browns, blacks and silvery whites.  hey are luminous and sublimely beautiful.

Shinjuku Sparrow

In the Shinjuku district, there is most of the cool shopping in Japan, with bold graphics and bling everywhere.  You can walk by a window of a dizzying variety of Nike shoes, complete with every color of the swoosh one can imagine.  There are watches upon watches upon watches.  The weirdest ice-cream cones imaginable; not really cones the way we know them, more like sweet, thin wraps  stuffed with every kind of sweet cream and fruit and nuts and syrup.

Shinjuku is blinding color and motion, though not nearly as loud as other cities.  It is a culture of consumers, just like ours.  There are odd knock-offs of American products and Hello Kitty shit everywhere. I have to admit, I rather like the Hello Kitty stuff, as it is very comics-like.  There are a lot of young Japanese artists whose styles are greatly indebted to comics and manga.  It is the visual lingua-franca of their culture; much like comics, tattoos, Mad Magazine, and horror movies were for me.

As a kid, I remember having a Ratfink figure, one of those masterpieces of hot-rod culture that Big Daddy Roth gave us.  I was seven or eight and this was my favorite thing in the world.  I remember having to fight this oafish asshole who tried to take it from me on the playground.  Eddie Josephi tried to  grab it from me.  The prick. Needless to say, I left the playground with my Ratfink and Eddie ran home like a bitch with a bloody nose.

Shinjuku made me think of childhood a lot.  This part of town is very rooted in youth culture and you can find comics and books everywhere here and in the Chiyoda district, I found three volumes of gorgeous Japanese birds and paid a fortune for it and lugged the heavy bastards back to Chicago.  But what a score!  Whoever illustrated this book really loved birds.  As a kid, I drew birds incessantly.  Our yard was full of sparrows and finches and cardinals, red-wing blackbirds, and mourning doves.  The birds of Japan are exotic to me.  I don’t know a lot about them, and when I look in these books, it is like being there.  The parks are full of ravens and cranes and every kind of songbird.  In Ueno Park you can watch ravens gobble down cicadas in the late summer, and see cranes standing still as glass in the lagoon.  I think Japanese parks are quiet so one can hear the birds and the water.  In what little public space there is in Tokyo, nature is observed and revered.

Small ghost singing
In a Tokyo alley
Broken mirror songs.

Ueno Park Goldfish

In Tokyo, there is a lovely, lush public green named Ueno Park.  It is full of beautifully sculpted trees; pines pruned to mimic bonsai motifs and ponds full of koi and carp and goldfish who come up to the surface and make sucking sounds that entreat tourists to feed them.  They will eat anything; hot-dogs, crackers, pretzels, cigarette butts; you name it.  The turtles also come over and mooch food as well.  Ueno Park was established by an imperial land grant in the 1920’s by Emperor Taishō. The official name of the park is “Ueno Imperial Gift Park,” lest anyone forget the largess of the Emperor.

It is a huge park complete with shrines, museums, a concert hall and a lovely grotto. If you are homeless in Tokyo, you probably live here. Though I didn’t notice a huge homeless population, people assure me it exists there.

Every spring, when the cherry blossoms are in bloom, the park is a magical burst of pinks and reds and the Japanese travel from near and far to sit under the cherry blossoms and picnic and drink wine and listen to music.  This is a centuries old celebration.   My next-door neighbor, the fine Chicago photo-based artist, Doug Fogelson, went for the spring this year and told me how magical it was.  Doug’s enthusiasm for this is part of why I went to  Japan and I’ll be forever grateful to him for  making me aware of this.

Ueno Park figures prominently in much of the native fiction and manga.  It occupies the former Kan’ei-ji,  the temple of the Shoguns, who’d built the temple to protect the Castle of Edo.

The carp are huge and beautiful and have as much personality as a fish can have, they have it.  One is struck by the reverence the Japanese have for their parks.  They are very quiet places; serene really, and not full of douche-bags throwing Frisbees to their dogs. Nor does anyone let their dog shit in the park.  Or if they do, they probably toss it to the carp.

Flying back from Tokyo is sad; first because I’m sad to leave that place I am so fascinated by.  Secondly, because the movies on the plane were Sandra Bullock movies, and my iPod ran out of juice an hour into the flight.

When I got back, my dog, Chooch, jumped all over me and was thrilled to see me. . .at first.  About an hour later, he started giving me the shit-eye for being gone so long.  Three pieces of salami fixed that.  Once I left Tokyo, I started missing it.  It is one of those places, like New Orleans, where square-pegs like me actually kind of fit in.

Crazy Horse Among Falling Stars

Upon  returning from Tokyo, I started re-reading my notes about Crazy Horse and at the same time, Basho’s poem-diaries. It struck me how much these two men were alike in a lot of ways. Matsuo Basho would often take long journeys on foot around Japan.  His final one is recounted in his most well known diary, Narrow Road to a Far Province.  It is Basho searching, trying to find, in nature, his reason, his task. . .his definition.

Crazy Horse wanted little to do with other people, red or white.  He was happiest out wandering in nature.  He was as content to sleep in a cave or a hole, as he was in a camp. He loved being out under the stars and was  comfortable with his own company.  There was a reason the Oglala referred to him as “our Strange Man.”  His nonconformity set him apart in a tribal culture.  He had much responsibility in his tribe.  He was among the most fierce of warriors; a brilliant tactical fighter and a superb hunter, and to his tribe, he was necessary and he was up to shouldering his immense responsibility to his people.  He hunted buffalo, he led war-parties and raids, but when the opportunity arose, he would go off by himself to be in nature and fast and seek visions.  He was curious about the spirits and the next world and he sought wisdom.  Like Basho, he was always searching and seeking knowledge.

In Tokyo, I visited some Shinto shrines and was struck by how much Shintoism reflects the beliefs of some Native American beliefs as well.  I’m not religious at all, but do tend to cede the power most attribute to god, to nature.  The Shinto teachings have an intense reverence for the natural world and the shrines are sublimely beautiful.

It may sound odd that I went to Japan to better understand Crazy Horse, but I think it helped.  In every culture, there are these odd-spirited men who don’t quite fit into the world easily, yet they push that culture forward for better and ill.  They are necessary people who don’t want to punch a clock or color inside the lines.   There is an otherness about them.  In Japan, the Haiku monks were thought to be oddballs in their day.  Basho was an admirer of Li-Po, the great Chinese poet of the 8th century, another wandering spirit enamored of wandering in nature.  It is not an accident that Haiku is rooted in nature and  reflects the seasonal shifts of one’s lifetime.

I hope that after Crazy Horse was murdered, he went somewhere.  He certainly deserved better than he got.  I don’t believe in the afterlife, but I’d like it if he had one.  Haitians refer to the land between the living and the dead as the “Gray World” and there is no time continuum; it is a place where Basho and Crazy Horse could meet.  I hope wherever Crazy Horse went, he wore a necklace of stars.

Tokyo Diary — Jingu Stadium

My last night in Tokyo, I wanted to see a baseball game.  Luckily, the Tokyo Yakult Swallows were hosting the Hiroshima Carp at Jingu Stadium.  It was a beautiful night for a ballgame and Jingu Stadium has the feel of an old-time ballpark; the kind where people go to watch the game, instead of each other.  There are no skyboxes or hundred-dollar box seats or any of that kind of horseshit.  It is a real ballpark.

There are a surprising number of Americans on both teams and one wonders how they wound up here.  It is a different game in Japan.  It is the very definition of “small ball;” the emphasis being on playing like a team.  Hit to get on base.  The most valuable players in Japanese baseball are the guys with the highest on-base percentage.  There are also a ton of women fans here; not girlfriends who got dragged to the game, but real baseball enthusiasts who wear the hats and bang the plastic bats together with  a rabid alacrity.

Me and John McNaughton are the children of lifelong White Sox fans.  Both of our fathers dutifully followed the Sox their whole lives without ever seeing them win it all. The closest they came was in 1959 when they lost the World Series to the LA Dodgers. We discussed our fathers in the cab on the way to Jingu Stadium.  It seems like we almost had the same father; both men being hard to please and somewhat suspect  of their sons’ chosen career paths.  One of the reasons I came to Japan is my father’s having fought in the Pacific in WWII.  He invaded Okinawa and witnessed a bestial, awful battle that forever colored the way he thought of  the Japanese.  I wondered, really, what this place was?  Our countries did grievous injury to each other almost 65 years ago.  Who are they now?  And who are we?

Part of the answer came to me tonight.  A man sitting next to us was wearing a Carps hat and, after a bit of conversation, told us the Carps were his hometown team.

Hiroshima.

I’m not used to thinking of Hiroshima as a place where people live. . .a community. . .but rather as the exclamation point of our war with Japan.  Hiroshima was an action, not a place.  Yet here we are, on a warm summer night in Tokyo talking with another baseball fan about our teams.  He asked us about the Cubs.  Of course we said “Fuck NO!” and he laughed.  We explained that we were real baseball fans; White Sox fans. On this night, almost three quarters of a century after our country tried to erase this man’s city from the earth, I met a  guy from the town of Hiroshima.  He’s lived there his whole life and he likes baseball.  He comes here for the same reasons I do; to try and remember what is good about where we live and who we are.