Collected Essays (19 page)

Interviews I had: (1) A music magazine with all Japanese writing on its cover except
New Age Total Magazine
, though perhaps the name is Rock Land, which phrase appears several times on the table of contents. This interview was conducted by a guy who had been active in getting The
Secret of Life
published in Japanese, which I’d never even known happened. (2)
Goro
, as mentioned. (3)
ASCII
, a computer magazine. I remembered near the end of the interview that my friend Bill Buckley writes a column for them. “Buckley and I smoke marijuana together at hackers’ conferences,” I told them truthfully, though mischievously. (4) Yesterday evening with
Hayakawa’s SF Magazine
. This was by my Japanese SF translator, a nice guy called Hiroshi. (5) and (6) Today by two more computer magazines,
Log In
and
Eye Com
. The guy who asked questions for both of them had some quite complicated fantasies about artificial realities. “In
Sim City
artificial world, would you rather be the mayor or the Sim?” He had the idea of
becoming
an artificial reality in which networkers live, any of them able at any time to, e.g., stop your heart. Another of his ideas was that you could shuffle your direct reality with someone else’s, taking in their reality as an artificial reality. If you did this very often, like ten times a second, you would effectively be living as them and as you. If you speeded up the shuffle rate and brought in more and more people, then everyone would be the same metaperson. A catch is that you probably couldn’t effectively even walk with all that shuffling. He gave me a wad of yen worth about $70 at the end of the interview! (7) Then a TV taped interview for NHK TV. This interview had interesting, well-thought-out questions, like, “How can artificial reality help children learn?” and several about ideas of cyberspace and mathenautics as a new frontier with an excitement more relevant to us than the somewhat boring and used-up stuff of space-travel. I really got into all this and laid it on thick, especially since the translator was the same charming woman, Ryoko Shinzaki, who had simultaneous-translated my speech. She was quite small when she stood up, but she had a beautifully symmetric face, with eyes that turned into semicircle slits when she smiled, also a nobly straight nose and a big upper lip. I got so interested in watching her talking that I would hardly hear what she said. (8) Then a stupid interview with someone who said he was a massage person who worked with HARP and mainly wanted to explain his theories of massage. I told him my gums hurt, and he pushed his knuckle into my hand until I said my gums felt okay. (9) Finally a magazine called
Diamond Executive
with a guy who actually understood no English, but would nod and look so much like a promising executive that you felt he was on your wavelength, only then the translator would take three minutes to tell him what you said.

The
Diamond Executive
’s translator was an expatriate American woman. I met several other people like her, Westerners who’d established themselves in niches of the Japanese culture. They all seemed to have a somewhat hangdog and dispirited air.

At the reception after the HARP stuff, there was a whole table covered with glasses of whisky on ice, God how I hated to leave that room! Standing there talking to the guys, two of them managers of HARP (at least seven people were introduced to me as
the
manager of HARP), and the guys are so fucking drunk they can hardly stand up, yet they give off no vibe of USA-style shame for their altered state.

We had supper with my science fiction guys from Hayakawa Publishing, Inc. As well as publishing
Hawakawa SF Magazine
, they’re the biggest SF book publisher in Japan, and have, incredibly, all of my books in print. If only I were so well-loved in the U.S. We ate as a party of 6 people in a basement French restaurant, some of the best French food I ever had, and then all five others start smoking, unbelievable, smoke and drink aren’t evil here and people aren’t embarrassed about sex, what a country.

Hiroshi the translator was a really good guy, I was tired but insisted on doing the interview after dinner to get it over with, up on the third floor with the Hayakawa offices—the French restaurant we had supper in turned out to be owned by Hayakawa, is in the basement of the same building. Propped my feet up on the sill of a huge open window, four and five-story Tokyo buildings outside, the night and the street, talking about my various careers. The electroshock excitement of the computer graphic world is one thing, the thoughtful artfulness of writing another, the clarifying formulas and occasional revelations of math a third, and the humble public service of teaching is an underlying fourth.

This morning Sylvia and I went to a shrine at Asakusa, on the way came up from the subway looking for breakfast, bought cheese rolls, but then where to eat? I ate mine on the street, but I wouldn’t do it again; if you eat in public, Japanese look at you like you’re taking a dump on the sidewalk. At the shrine there were zillions of school children, all in white shirts, so cute, group after group coming up to us, “May I speak with you?” to practice their English. At the shrine there was a shiny brass Buddha to one side, with a slot for money. You put money in the slot and then rub a certain part of Buddha, and then rub the same part of you, to heal. I tried it on my cheek over the gum where I’ve had the unbelievable, unrelenting pain ever since I had a bunch of back teeth pulled two weeks ago; recently I’ve been scraping agonized gum away to chip off spiky dead jawbone frags, and stirring up incredible endless torture of nerves up and down neck and deep into inner ear. The bone pieces are like having a three-dimensional Mandelbrot set pushed through my gum one cross-section at a time. (See my essay, "The Rudy Set Fractal," for images.)

We had a disgusting lunch in a badly chosen restaurant. Many Japanese restaurants display plastic models of the food they serve; I ordered from the plastic displays, but erred and ended up with a potty of utterly tasteless tofu custard, and a salad of cold noodles topped with 2 maraschino cherries and slices of scrambled eggs. Yum! Actually it had a single tempura shrimp on it, the come-on. Two women in kimonos were there eating, one of them our age, delicately pincering bits, her complex cheek muscles working. The waitress had hair over her face and a cheesy dumbbell mouth with the upper lip literally vertical at the ends where it met the lower lip.

I played pachinko, you put a few bucks in a machine and get a basket of ball bearings, and then dump them in a hopper and they are rapid fired into a steep, nearly vertical playboard studded with nails and with high-scoring input hoppers here and there, and a big zero-score hopper at the bottom. Your control over it is via a knob that affects the speed with which the successive balls are launched up into the board. A special hopper guarded by two kneeling spacemen figures opened up on my machine, and I held the knob at the right position for many balls to stream in there. More and more pay-off balls came out into a basket under the machine—there’s a slot-machine aspect to it, and you get paid off with extra balls—finally I had a whole shoebox full of balls, many more than the 700 yen worth I’d started with. Sylvia and I took the box of balls back to a woman in an apron, she had the stubby sticking-out curly bob so popular here, she poured the zillion balls into a counting machine and gave me a piece of paper and gestured towards some cigarettes and candies. “Can I get money?” I said, pointing towards some coins in my hand. She nods and gives me some lighter-flints with the brand name “MONY.” Like what are these good for? This is
money
? I start to complain, then she gets another girl to watch the counter while she leads me out of the parlor, out of the chrome and the whooping sound effects, into the street, down an alley to the right, down a smaller alley to the left, walking rapidly in front of me, aproned, walking with a rocking motion, walking so fast I can barely keep up and Sylvia is a block behind me, she stops finally and points to the door under a horizontal red sign with writing on it, I go in, there is a tiny window at waist level, wood, I put the MONY lighter flints in there, and a hand passes out 2200 yen! Three to one payoff, all right! I asked my Japanese contacts about it later, they said, yes it is always lighter flints, and it would be illegal for the payoff to be inside the pachinko parlor proper, but this way is all right.

On the subway riding back, looking at the faces across from us, I see one old guy with a face all folded, the upper eyelids folded over the lower lids, the mouth folded shut, huge eyebrows, skinny skinny legs, he made me think of my pictures of old idol D. T. Suzuki in his
What is Zen?
book. Next to the old guy I see a succession of younger guys, one replacing the other stop by stop, the flow of life through the different bodies of man, each of them so individual and various, each life unique.

May 31, 1990. The Gold Disco.

Yesterday evening we went to the Gold Disco, a multi-story building that looks like a shitty warehouse from the outside, down under a freeway by the river, guests of the same Mr. Takemura who was the organizer and panel-discussion leader for the HARP Cyberspace Symposium. He is a man who looks and behaves something like our San Francisco SF friend Richard Kadrey, kind of a maven, hiply up on all the latest. I first met Takemura when Allison Kennedy of
Mondo
2000 put him onto me in SF, he was doing an article for a Japanese magazine called
Excentric
, a
Mondo
-type publication with features on all the weirdos in a different given area each issue. He photogged me in front of the San Francisco Masonic headquarters in my red sweater, had me in the mag with Dr Tim Leary of course, and mind-blown John Lilly, and Marc Pauline, who puts on the great Survival Research Labs fire-breathing renegade robot events, also Steve Beck, a friend of Allison’s who does computer graphic acid videos and talks about using electric fields to stimulate phosphene visions in the closed eye, which process he calls “virtual light.”

Here in Tokyo Mr. Takemura is quite a heavy dude it seems, and he does a monthly “show” at the Gold Disco. His show is a series of collaged videos he makes, also lighting effects, smoke clouds and scent clouds, and fast acid-house disco. The Gold Disco building has a traditional Japanese restaurant on an upper floor, we went there first, it was an airy room open at the sides to the sky (though it developed, on closer inspection that this “outdoors” was an artificial reality, was really a black painted ceiling with brisk ventilation, and that there was another story above ours!) Sylvia and I were quite hungry, having skipped supper till now (9:00 PM) as Mr. Takemura’s friend Kumiko had assured us it would be “traditional” Japanese food, which Sylvia and I imagined as being banquet-like. Jaron Lanier was there, also Steve Beck and Allison Kennedy, also two friends of Jaron’s, also Sylvia’s cousin Zsolt and his wife Helga. Zsolt grew up in Budapest with Sylvia, now he’s turned German and he’s here in the employ of Bayer doing chemical engineering of rubber. Various Japanese companies have licenses to use Bayer’s proprietary trade-secret ways of making rubber have special properties, and Zsolt oversees some of that.

We’re eating in a tatami room, meaning you sit on the ground with a tiny lacquered TV-dinner tray in front of you. First a waitress in a really great kimono and obi crawls around taking orders, and then there appears a geisha in the center of the floor/table, sitting there like a center-piece, simpering a bit and fanning herself, answering a few questions which we Westerners put through Kumiko, me and Sylvia too appalled however to ask anything. Completely white face and red lips, all kinds of plastic and cloth in her hair, major kimono silk, etc. “She’s not actually a geisha,” Kumiko explains, “She is younger, she is a Maiko, this is a young girl of 15 to 20 who has not mastered the necessary skills of singing or storytelling or music to be a geisha, she will in fact most likely not become a geisha, her purpose here is really to find a man who will take care of all her needs.” And keep her as mistress, it goes without saying. She’s plain and looks sad, and makes me feel so uncomfortable, she’s like the goat tethered as bait for the T. Rex in
Jurassic Park
. Then all of a sudden we have to run downstairs to be photographed by Japan’s most famous society photog, in front of The Gold Disco, all of us, The Gold Disco supposedly the hottest place in Tokyo these days, just like Andy Warhol or something man, outrageous, and we’re just people after all, we glittery ones, then it’s back upstairs and
whew
we have a new maiko, and this one is cute and
loud
, asking questions and saying things. And here’s the food. A plate with a spiral tree snail, perhaps not dead, three whole salted shrimp each the size of a toenail clipping, and a small piece of what I take to be tuna, but is, on biting, a slice of some fish’s long strip of roe, all egg-crunchy. Now the second course comes, two rice balls for me—
ba-ru
, the loud geisha explains, making a throwing motion, meaning “ball,” and then putting her hands up to her mouth “gobble gobble,” she’s a regular bad-ass teenager under the paint, and three crab claw tips for Sylvia, who thought to ask for them. Not much food but lots of sake.

Then it’s downstairs to see Mr. Takemura’s show, first Lanier and I go down, then a bit later Sylvia—who’d been waiting around in the hope of more food—is led down with the others by the loud junior geisha, who starts dancing, what a sight to see her in the disco, it made me feel so much better for her to be there amidst the incredibly various throng. For me the best thing of all in the disco was that, incredibly, they had a computer monitor set into the wall with
CA Lab
running on it, showing my high-speed “Rug” rule.

Later we went up one floor to the so-called Love Sex Club, a lovers’ retreat with big banquette/bed seats and a bar decorated with skeletons, skulls, and, dig this, bottles of clear alcohol, each containing an entire gecko, a really
big
gecko, barely fitting in the liter bottle man, not just some insignificant tequila worm here. According to Steve and Allison, who’d already tried it a few days before, this is an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac. Sylvia and I split a glass of it, as do Zsolt and his wife. And soon thereafter we all go home to bed. Dot, dot, dot.