Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Film “My Dinner with Andre” Part I: Wally in New York

Note: Opening a multi-part early series from my first blog Classical Sympathies back in 2009, this piece takes up the beginning of Wallace Shawn’s walk through New York en route to his meeting with André Gregory in My Dinner with Andre, using Wally’s voice-over as a lens on artistic precarity, everyday survival, and the comic disproportion between existential weight and mundane errands. The note situates the film’s opening movement as both narrative setup and philosophical framing: a winter city of post offices, xerox shops, and unanswered calls becomes the psychological prelude to a conversation that will later expand into memory, performance, and self-mythology. This installment follows Wally up to his arrival at the restaurant for the pre-dinner drink, where the film’s central encounter is still suspended in anticipation, and meaning is generated less by action than by the act of getting there.

My Dinner with Andre is the famous, or infamous, 1981 film of a dinner conversation between Wallace Shawn, the actor and playwright, and Andre Gregory, the theater director. If I were to make a twofold claim for the film: i) that it is one of the most action packed films ever made, and ii) that it effectively encapsulates the thematics of the entire 20th century, I do not think this would be overstatement. My intent here, however, is not to establish either of these postulates, but rather to simply “blog” the script in the hopes that what needs to be said works its way to the surface. Fair warning: the undertaking will require several posts.

Money crops up on two of the first three pages of the script, and because money, and the lack of it, is a theme that runs beneath the entire script: Andre has money, has the freedom to travel and to spend several years trying to “find himself”; Wally does not. Still, “having money” is, as ever, a relative concept. At the opening of the film, Wally is seen walking through the streets of New York, heading for the restaurant where he is to meet Andre. It appears to be winter, maybe February. In the opening voice-over, Wally ruminates on the life of the artist: The life of a playwright is tough. It’s not easy, as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays, and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living–acting, in my case–and people don’t hire you. So you spend your days crossing the city back and forth doing the errands of your trade. Today wasn’t any easier than any other day. I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls, then I’d gone to the stationary store to buy envelopes, and then to the xerox shop. There were dozens of things to do. By five o’clock I’d finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile checking constantly with my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In the morning, the mailbox had been stuffed with bills. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them? After all, I was doing my best (17).

One of the marvelous things about the film is the tongue-in-cheek humor that is rarely, if ever, directly alluded to. A deeply serious film, Andre is also a comedy, a fact which we can recognize because we see that the writers are having fun with the characters who are in turn themselves. That is, Wally and Andre are playing versions of themselves–we assume that most of the experiences that Andre recounts in the film are based on real experiences, and that Wally’s account of his home life is more or less true to life–but exaggerated versions. As Shawn says in the preface to the script, “I knew immediately that {…} I’d have to distort us both slightly–our conflicts would have to become sharpened–we’d have to become–well–characters {…} It would be an enormously elaborate piece of construction” (14). In this initial passage, the humor lies in Wally’s conception of a difficult life: “I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls.”

Wally’s sense of pressure is, from the outset, deliberately out of proportion to the scale of his circumstances. The tone is one of genuine complaint, but the complaint itself is almost comically domestic: the architecture of a “hard day” is built out of errands, envelopes, xerox shops, and an answering service that may or may not contain salvation in the form of an acting job. What Shawn achieves here, and what the film quietly sustains, is a recalibration of seriousness—where existential weight is not attached to grand events but to the texture of administrative survival. Wally’s New York is not a place of romance or revelation, but of circulation: between post office, mailbox, and telephone, as though modern artistic life has been reduced to a loop of deferred contact with recognition.

At the same time, the humor is never fully separable from sincerity. Wally is not merely being mocked; he is also articulating a recognisable condition of artistic precarity, one that the film refuses to glamorize. The genius of the opening monologue lies in this double register: we are invited to laugh at the disproportion between emotional tone and material fact, but we are also made to recognise how easily that disproportion becomes a lived reality. The “dozens of things to do” are not nothing; they are just insufficiently legible as crisis, which is precisely what makes them feel like crisis.

By the time Wally finally moves through the city toward the restaurant, the structure of the film has already been quietly established: this is a world in which meaning is not delivered through events but through the way events are narrated to oneself while walking between obligations. New York, in this sense, is not a backdrop but a medium of self-composition—an environment in which thought is constantly being assembled under mild pressure, as though consciousness itself were an errand.

He checks the time again, as he has been doing throughout the afternoon, and adjusts his route slightly, not out of urgency so much as orientation. The meeting with André already exists in his mind as something slightly unreal, a fixed appointment that has not yet been granted substance by arrival. He crosses another block, passes into the thinning evening light, and begins to approach the restaurant where, for the first time that day, the structure of waiting will shift from solitary to shared.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Coming Through

New Note: This essay sits roughly in the middle of my writing life online. By the time it was written I had already spent several years experimenting with ideas and forms in earlier blogs—first Classical Sympathies, which was more academic and literary in tone, and later Jungian Intimations, which tried to bring Jungian psychology, symbolism, and dream material into a more personal register. Both projects were attempts to understand the terrain of the mind and the pressures placed on a thinking person trying to live inside modern institutions.

“On Coming Through” belongs to that same line of inquiry, but it also marks a turning point. At the time I felt strongly that one phase of life—what might loosely be called early adulthood—was coming to a close. The essay reflects an effort to make sense of that closing: the roles I had played, the ambitions that had driven me, and the ways in which those ambitions both clarified and constrained the direction of my life.

The language of Jung, Hollis, and Rudhyar appears throughout the piece because those writers were the tools I was using at the time to think about cycles of development, identity, and what Jung famously called individuation. Looking back now, some of the terminology feels a little grand, but the underlying questions remain ones I still care about: how a person develops a provisional identity in youth, how that identity eventually exhausts itself, and how one finds the courage to begin again.

In hindsight this essay also foreshadows something that had not yet fully taken shape for me: the idea that writing itself might become the primary vehicle through which I would explore those questions. The project I mention near the end—“Where I’m Coming From: A Straight Answer to the Smart Kids”—was never completed in the form imagined here. But in another sense it never really went away either. Many of the later essays I would write over the following decade, including those that eventually appeared on The Kyoto Kibbitzer, are variations on that same impulse: to record honestly what it feels like to move through the world as a reflective person trying to make sense of culture, relationships, and the shifting terrain of the self.

For that reason I have left the essay largely as it was originally written. It captures a particular moment in the middle of the journey—after the early experiments of Classical Sympathies and Jungian Intimations, but before the more narrative, outward-facing voice that would later emerge. Seen from that vantage point, it reads less like a conclusion and more like a bridge between phases of thought and writing.

Original Note: This little piece is a lightly structured meditation on aspects of the past and clarification of intentions concerning the future.  It appends my previous statement of intent from four years ago (posted below).  Although there is some continuity of concern, specifically around the nature of the demands that playing a role or roles in society places on the individual actor, and some continuity of theory through the continued influence of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, hopefully there is some new material and new thinking as well.  I should acknowledge a debt to several writers whom I have read intensively over the past four years: most especially this piece bears the fingerprints of Carl Jung, James Hollis, and Dane Rudhyar, and many of the ideas here would not exist, or at least not be as fully articulated, without their assistance.  I should also acknowledge that I have been experimenting with different means of writing, different approaches to producing a text, and to the extent that anything herein bears traces of the spirit I can claim no credit.

Epigraph:

“I wanna dedicate this to someone out there watching tonight, I know she knows who she is.”

Bob Dylan, spoken introduction to “Oh Sister.”  From the bootleg record “Songs for Patty Valentine.”

Today I feel as if I stand at the edge of a new world.  The journey through early adulthood has drawn itself to a close, in stages, over the past several years, and I am alive to the fact that a new journey must now be set out upon.  In order to face any new journey properly, with intelligence and intention, we are called upon first to recognize the altered nature of the landscape we will make our way across in the new phase.

The longer I live, the more I understand the words of Ecclesiastes, “to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens.”  Each era of our lives, each season, sometime even each week or set of weeks, seems to take on a certain coloring and certain characteristics that differentiate it from what came before, just as each zone of time seems to require different things of us.  The strength of our intention and will, as well as the quality and effectiveness of our reactions and decision making, are forever put to the test in small ways, and large ones, and we are forced to define, if only to ourselves, the nature of our relationship to our surroundings, our community, our dharma, our fate.

When we are young, time seems to stretch on almost indefinitely.  The summer of my eighth year, for example, was experienced as a vast expanse of almost undifferentiated time; two or three weeks would pass in a barely conscious haze of biking around my parent’s property, hiking and collecting stones from quarries in the area, or sitting on the roof in the sun, a child in the flow of nature, without “problems” of his own.  Looking back on such a period today, it indeed has a coloring of a kind, and this coloring is so loaded with low-grade nostalgia and barely remembered circumstances that my memories exist not so much in the form of events, rather in the form of a “feel.”  I have a sense of what it felt like to be eight, a sense of the patterns into which life energy fell or was collected, pooled, also a sense of my budding interests, which would in time round into what we are pleased to call “personality.”  There was nothing specific that I was “up to,” and I never had the need to think more than a day or so in advance.  The expression of my energy was essentially aligned with the desires of my heart as much as at that age we can know these at all–or perhaps that is just the point, in a state of primitive unknowingness we are naturally and effortlessly aligned with the desires of our heart, and only when we begin to have to analyze or ask after these do we begin to lose connection with them.

As we grow, the process of socialization begins to crowd in on us, and no person, no personality, is wholly free from the pressures of socialization, of collective expectation, of the reactive categorizations and projections of the always slightly behind-the-curve zeitgeist.  Depending on our own type and manner of apprehending the world as it appears to us, we react and position ourselves in some relation to, at some angle toward, the categories and projections that surround us.  Indeed, both the conformist and the rebel define themselves in relation to and reaction to “the system,” and in many ways their respective positioning is far more similar than otherwise.  Dane Rudyhar makes this point clearly, as do, in more elliptical and elaborated terms, Berger and Luckmann.  Even those (myself for example) who purport or imagine to be able to live outside of collective expectations, to create their own life and write their own script, yet define themselves primarily through the categories that the zeitgeist makes available–it takes work, huge, lasting work, to even begin to transcend one’s era and circumstance in even the smallest part.

The first part of life is necessarily a struggle to find one’s footing in the swim of society, to demonstrate value, usefulness, and the ability to check whichever boxes one is asked to check.  Occasionally, we meet someone who in significant ways seems to have wrenched herself free of some of this static at an earlier age, but even such persons habitually define themselves in terms of existing categories and remain to some extent still a prisoner of them.  For most of us, the child turned young adult, buffeted by external events and demands, adjusts herself over a period of years by applying her core characteristics, tendencies, and abilities to the game as it seems to present itself, and in the process slowly relinquishes immediate touch with that inner voice that provided direction to the child of nature who knew instinctively what was and wasn’t good for her, what was and wasn’t desirable.

At the same time, the goals that one identifies for oneself in youth are not to be lightly dismissed.  They do often provide a symbol sufficient, to borrow Jung’s phrase, to drive libido up a gradient steeper than nature; one learns to accomplish “work,” and to appreciate both the material and ego-related satisfactions that comes from this accomplishment.  Jung says as much when he tells us that it is essentially heathy and necessary when a young person becomes “entangled with fate” which “(involves) him in life’s necessities and the consequent sacrifices and efforts through which his character is developed and his experience matured.”  This dance with fate leads us into a variety of positions and stances, some of which we may carry out with grace and ease, others of which require contortions which we preform without a clear sense of the relationship between the presented or required form and our ability to functionally engage with that form.

Under the pressure to make something of ourselves, to build a career, a business, an image, a body of work, to make more of time by trying to subdue it, we may come to feel that we have found the game, we are on the fast track, we are properly situated under the stage lights, playing the part as it is supposed to be played.  A little light, a little attention, these things classically and nearly inevitably lead to a degree of what Jung calls “inflation,” the expansion of ego-consciousness and the over-identification with the product of one’s work in the world as the summum bonum.  The small still voice of the spirit recedes, or expresses itself through fantasy and other forms of idle ideational free association–fantasies of setting out to sea, of starting over with a new name in an unknown land, of being orphaned and having to fend for oneself, intriguing as these dreams may be they most often serve to cement through counterpoint the existence we actually live out and the style, or lack thereof, in which we do so.

My favorite singer, Matthew Houck from Phosphorescent has a song called Los Angeles where he describes the deeply ambivalent relationship one can have toward one’s accomplishments in the world.  He sings:

The road is alive/ And everybody’s all here/ I’m closing my eyes/ Till the colours appear/ Oh me oh my/ Ain’t it funny up here/ To stand in the light/ Said I ain’t come to Los Angeles just to die

They told me my eyes/ Would never be clearer/ To hold on to mine/ Make good money out here/ They told me those lies/ Just a grinning from ear to ear/ They said ‘here is our offer, ain’t it fine’

Are you getting a lot of attention now/ Are you bleeding in every direction now/ Are they covering you up with affection now/ Are they giving you a lot of attention now…Said I ain’t came here to Los Angeles, baby, just to die

I know, in exquisite and painful detail, exactly what Houck means (or I know exactly what he means to me, which is all the audience can ever really claim to know).  He means that when you bring your interior goods, your art, your vision, your beauty and light, out into the public eye and when some part of that is seen as having value or serving the purposes of established interests, an offer is made whereby your specific value, your original genius and spark, is rewarded at the same time as it is strangled, rewarded through exposure and compensation, and strangled as established interests nearly always (but perhaps not absolutely always) want and need to tie you to a set of projections and definitions that have already taken external form and are recognized as valid, and therefore commodifiable, categories.

At the same time, the singer in this equation is not without culpability in the narrowing of his own genius.  He knows that the kind of attention he is getting is dangerous for him, that it threatens to bring out his worst tendencies, his tendency toward excess, and to distance him from the source of his own art, but he is getting a little addicted to the attention, to the light.  The paradox, or trap, turns out to be that it is very, very difficult for a younger person in the first flush of ego-development to stand in the stage lights for too long without beginning to mistake this external light for the light inside.  Although the singer is trapped, he recognizes the trap, recognizes that he is dying out there, and the song remains hopeful, hopeful that the singer will be able to relocate the reasons for coming to Los Angeles in the first place.  After all, if he didn’t come all the way to Los Angles just to die, he came for some other purpose.

However, what the singer maybe does not recognize is that sometimes a death is necessary in order for life to begin anew.  Most ancient cultures, perhaps all, practiced sacrifice, and the idea at the heart of sacrifice is precisely this–new life follows inexorably from the exhaustion of the old.  The ancients, being literal minded and without the ability to metaphorize as fully as humanity has since learned to, could only see this sacrifice as taking physical form–thus human and animal sacrifice entailed actual bloodletting.  The story of Issac in the Bible, as well as the story of Job, are in fact kind of metaphors for a psychological hinge point in the development of consciousness among the people of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, a development which eventually led, among other things, to the dwindling of the use of such literal forms of religious sacrifice, but the core idea remains in our present culture in all sorts of places.  (Indeed, much of the Old Testament deals with the development of what we call “consciousness” and the alterations in the character of the Old Testament god mirror alterations in the fundamental psychological character and mentality of the swim of generations over a period of several hundred or a thousand years leading up to to the birth of Christ.)  That is kind of another story, so let us just say that all nature seems to be structured around cyclicality, not so much linearity.  From the ashes of the old comes the living spark of the new.  

The above outline of the first flush of adulthood and its inevitable compromises is not original to me, and those who have looked honestly and hard at the development of the human life have set out this process much more precisely.  James Hollis puts it this way: “What I have called the middle passage arises from the collision of the provisional personality–that group of behaviors, attitudes toward self and other, and reflexive responses which the child is obliged to assemble and manage its relationship with an all powerful environment–with the insurgency of the natural, instinctual Self (…) The passage is experienced as an enervation of the former way of seeing oneself or of one’s functioning in the world (…) The exhaustion of the old is the occasion for the advent of the new, though we are seldom pleased to suffer that death which is necessary for older values to be supplanted.  In fact, one may wander, alone and afraid, for a very long time in the great In-Between before a new psychic image will arise to direct libido into the required development channel.”  Enervation means weakening, loss of vigor, and what Hollis points to in his description of mid-life is a kind of inflection point that I think actually occurs periodically through life, a juncture where one is obliged to examine that agglomeration of the “provisional personality” and the diminishing returns it may be receiving.  Once again, constructing an effective set of behaviors and approaches to the work of life turns out not to be a fully linear process, rather it seems to be cyclical and to necessitate periods of emptiness and exhaustion as well as periods of zenith and culmination.

The last three years of my own life have been but stages toward the exhaustion of this provisional personality.  A character from the television show “The Wire,” explaining to another character that when he says he is ready he means it, says something to the effect of: “you have no idea what I had to do to get to where I am today.”  To the extent that I have embodied and carried out my statement of intent from 2010, I can with some justification say the same.  Being in a position to say this is not necessarily the most pleasant place to be, and I cannot really recommend my process and progress through the proverbial belly of the whale to anyone, certainly not to anyone with a faint heart.  However, along the way I have been blessed, there is no better word, to have met extraordinary people who have given me essential clues as to from where and in which direction my second journey would launch.  I have also been fortunate beyond all measure and worthiness to have received several “big dreams,” and if this indeed characteristic of the stellium in my astrological ninth house (Rudhyar writes that a ninth house person will be drawn to “whatever expands a person’s field of activity or the scope of his mind–long journeys, close contacts with other cultures and with foreigners in general, and (…) ‘great dreams'”) I will take it.  Finally, through periods of intense work and strain which have combined, sometimes combustibly and unpredictably with both great people and great dreams, my consciousness has pulsed or rippled open a fraction, in the process integrating to some extent my inferior functions, first feeling, and then, more challengingly, sensing.

Coming to terms with one’s inferior functions is an essential part of coming to terms with one’s limitations, as these are much the same thing.  However, in some mysterious way that I can barely begin to name, I feel as if I am carrying, and trying to pay off, a larger karmic debt of some kind.  To be honest, I don’t even know how to begin to write about this.  Two years ago, in the autumn, I consulted a humanistic astrologer based in the United Kingdom.  Very well known in her field, she turned out, over Skype, to be deeply learned as well as deeply open and generous.  Her reading was strong, interesting in every respect, but still it was a reading–she has a professional method which she applied with ease and confidence.  Except in one respect–twice during the reading she stumbled, paused, lot her train of thought and said that she couldn’t put her finger on something.  The first time was when she said that I was on the verge of leaving behind an ancestral inheritance 500 years in the making.  She didn’t know what this was, but said it was in my bloodline.  Thirty minutes later or so she cycled back to it, saying she couldn’t make it out but that I was poised to see something or break out of a way of reacting or thinking that had held back my ancestors for generations.  Her reading took place a few months after my inheritance dream, which occurred in the summer of 2011.  Here is the dream:

My father is due to receive an inheritance, and his acceptance of it somehow enables others (his extended family) to also share in the inheritance.  My mother is telling me this in a darkened bedroom with my father outside the door.  She doesn’t want him to hear that she is telling me this, and keeps lowering her voice.  I get the impression that my father’s portion of the inheritance is relatively small, but somehow his taking of it is key to everyone’s access.  While at first I think that it is only a medium sized inheritance, suddenly the television comes on and begins to give more backstory.  It turns out, according to the program, that my father is attached, in a roundabout way, to one of the largest fortunes in the world, and one that is intimately connected to shadowy political power in some unnamed European countries (perhaps Germany, Austria, but spilling westward as well).  The program is a fairly typical expose of networks and hidden hands behind the throne, but nonetheless absolutely riveting.  There is a single male figure at the center of this network, shown briefly in the dream standing behind a spokesman who is speaking into a microphone.  This takes place on a lawn in front of a large and well-to-do house, but both the male figure and the house appear relatively normal and not obviously terrifying or malevolent.  My father’s reluctance to take up his inheritance thus represents a reluctance to involve himself in the political power networks, but the program makes clear through implication that failure to take up the inheritance poses a danger both to himself, and perhaps to my mother and myself.  Much or all of the action in the dream takes place indirectly–through implication or (literally) through a screen.

Humankind being a pattern seeking animal, of course I immediately connected the two data points with a third, the moment in which Ruth Van Reken, the author of “Third Culture Kids” and basically co-founder of this field of study, told me in a hotel lounge in Singapore in March of that same year that god had a mission for me, and a fourth, a quiet but persistent inner voice telling me I had a gift that was not being fully given to others, a gift I was holding inside, that I had another gear, that perhaps I hadn’t come to Los Angeles just to die.

What, in hindsight, I was dealing with and trying to make sense of was in fact Hollis’ insurgent self, a self which was seeking a new psychic image, a new core myth around which a fresh tapestry of charged energy could be woven.  I was living Jung’s individuation, or it was living through me.  This quest was apparent as the subtext to the inheritance dream, and many others of that period.  After writing down the inheritance dream I commented as follows:

There is a lot of context for the dream, best summarized as a fluid and somewhat wild/ chaotic/ noisy social night scene.  This kind of backdrop is quite common in my dreams, so much so I am inclined to refer to my ‘long night dreams’.  These usually take place over several ‘hours’ and spill late into the night or early morning.  They generally build through escalating events/ imagery and crystalize in a single memorable and stirring image.  The dream about an inheritance is in this larger category, but the specific incident in question feels broken out of its immediate context and stands alone in the dreamspace.

Another memorable long night dream from a slightly earlier period culminated in a scene where I came upon a group of revelers around a bonfire, deep in the forest, swinging in hammocks or dancing unrestrainedly some hours after midnight–maybe two in the morning.  Although I was not, knew I was not, of them, I longed to join in their joyous communal frenzy.  This image of a revelry around a bonfire possessed an energetic charge that animated all that came into contact with it, in other words this image, the image of the inheritance, and other images buried late in these long night dreams, were presenting themselves as possible material for my personal myth.  I can imagine a life founded on the idea of an enormous inheritance or a communal dance just as the grail image has, as Robert Johnson convincingly argues, served as the founding myth for western masculinity for a thousand years.

Standing back a little, and thinking about how it is that I have the courage to face a new journey, certain steps, some fairly conventional, others rather more esoteric and specific, have been necessary for me to face the future with confidence and with nerve, to lay the past to rest, to open a new channel to life.  Life, sounds, smells, textures, colors, spill into me and swirl around as never before, and a multi-year process has certainly reached exhaustion, and cleared the way for a realized rebirth.  Rudhyar writes revealingly about the ending of a cycle: “Any person who has had to improvise a speech after a dinner party knows how difficult it is to bring his talk to a convincing and significant end.  When coming to the close of their speech many speakers fumble, repeat themselves, go from climax to anticlimax, and perhaps let their words die out wearily and inconclusively (…) The composer of music, the dramatist, and the novelist often find the same difficulty when confronted with the obvious necessity of bringing their works to a conclusion.”  He goes on: “the natural end of everything is exhaustion–one gets exhausted and so do the people around you.  The speech or the individual himself, dies rather meaninglessly of old age.  Unless the self, the spiritual being, takes control and, binding up all the loose strings of the great lifelong effort, gathers the most essential elements into an impressive and revealing conclusion, there is danger that the great moment will become obscured by the settling dust of the struggle.”

Here, Rudhyar seems to be talking about the end of life, but a little later it becomes clear that he is actually talking about all acts, all events: “The art of bringing every experience to a creative end is the greatest of all arts (…) What this art demands first of all is the courage to repudiate the ‘ghosts’ of the past.  It is this repudiation that is also called severance (…) One must have the courage to dismiss the things unsaid, the gestures unloved, the love unexperienced, and to make a compelling end on the basis of what has been done.”  In other words, a graceful ending acknowledges that there is a great deal more that could have been done, and nonetheless strives to encapsulate and put into perspective that which was done.

With exhaustion of the old comes, as we have seen, the first breath of the new.  In what areas, to what purpose, and up which gradient ought I to apply my newfound energies and intent?  I suspect that the paying off of whatever karmic debt I am holding is a necessary feature of taking up whatever inheritance is to be assumed.  Once again, Rudhyar gives us a hint when he writes of crossing the threshold of rebirth: if the individual “has absorbed and assimilated the darkness represented by the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’–the memories and complexes of the personal and collective Unconscious–then the Tone of the new cycle can ring out clearly.  The individual, conscious of his true Identity, is able to use for his purpose of destiny whatever conditions have been inherited from his past and the past of his race, from his parents and from humanity” (italics in the original).

I love this phrase, “the Tone of the new cycle,” capitalized Tone, (by which we could also understand to mean “style”).  If indeed I am saddled with some sort of baggage from centuries past, an idea which I do not advance lightly in the least, then clearly it is my duty as a future directed individual who simultaneously “believes” in cyclicality as a basic principle of human and natural operations, to transform the elements of this baggage, this ragged tune, into a new tone which can ring clear to anyone who might benefit in some way from hearing it.  My listeners, my audience, are those smart kids who, blessed and cursed with preciosity, struggle to make sense of the terrain of their own mind which, in the immortal words of Gerard Manly Hopkins has mountains, O the mind, mind has mountains.

In order to reach authentically another I need then to perform in my own style.  Arriving at an original style is the first great challenge for any artist; in the arts formally this generally entails assimilating the style of others with one’s own insurgent urge toward expression such that the resulting product is recognizably your own and resonates with your inner sense of what you are about.  The effort to live one’s life with style, to make of one’s life a work of art, is harder still, for instead of working toward a finished product, a song, a novel, poem, or canvas, we are instead seeking to infuse each moment, each encounter, each event pocket, with creative intent and energy.  This effort requires attention as well as imagination, and here attention and imagination exist in a delicate and precise balance. Without attention the mind quickly loses itself in projection, in maya, the mist of illusion and fantasy.  However, without imagination attention may be overly focussed in the immediately apparent and explicable.  Hollis quotes Gaston Bachelard: “Psychically, we are created by our reverie–created and limited by our reverie–for it is the reverie which delineates the furthest limits of our mind.”  The courage to imagine, to wander, and to bring back to and integrate into diurnal consciousness the imprints and impressions of our furthest wanderings, this is the courage we may need in order to live at the highest levels of creativity.

This essay is beginning to feel the pressure to make a compelling end.  The other evening, I ran into an acquaintance from an earlier incarnation and we started talking event theory.  He summarized his own view of events in five words: “an event should be eventful.”  The eventfulness of an event depends on both the arrangement and combination of space, time and energy to create an event arc with pockets of luminosity and on the willingness of the participant to experience eventfulness, to happen.  Oddly, happenings are neither entirely willed and created nor entirely received.  Instead, happenings and events transpire in the liminal band between will and fate, writer and muse, figure and ground.  Phosphorescent again: “See I was the wounded master/ oh then I was the slave/ my hands and my mouth, aw honey/ they would not behave/ See, I was the holy writer/ then I was the page/ I was the bleeding actor/ then I was the stage.”  Who are we in our journey through life, around, and back again?  Are we the maker, or the made?  The master, or the slave?  The writer, or the page?  The actor, or the stage?  The happening, or the happened to?  Are we in charge of our own destiny or awash and afloat in a current so much stronger than we are?  Are we all of these things simultaneously?  What is my mission on this new journey I am called to alight upon?  What is the mission of my young friends, a generation younger than I, who face the difficult transition to adulthood in the keening wind of the 21st century?

My deepest wish is simply this, that today’s smart kids may navigate the delicate relationship between their mind and their life during the first half of life in a more graceful and integrated manner than have I, that they receive, if only from a handful of people, compassionate help and understanding to this end, and that the experiences visited upon me may in some small way assist this integration, if necessary as a sort of sacrifice.  Perhaps in the end this makes me too an “established interest.”  However, I hope I have no specific requirements any more than I have specific requirements for myself, no program, no method, no dogma other than the welling hope that when they reach their own Los Angeles they are able to negotiate their own terms upon being asked to stand for a while in the light.

On the last page of Italo Calvino’s masterpiece Invisible Cities, the Great Khan and Marco Polo are concluding their conversation about Polo’s travels across the globe.

Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

He said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.  There are two ways to escape suffering it.  The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.  The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who worked at Cambridge, once advised a colleague to leave the university as there was “no oxygen” for him there.  Upon being asked why then he, Wittgenstein, stayed, the philosopher is said to have replied: “It doesn’t matter…I manufacture my own oxygen.”  While I am deeply grateful to those handful of people who have gone out of their way to give me space, in some ways I feel as if I have to too great a degree, had to manufacture my own oxygen.  Perhaps the atmosphere of the coming journey will consist of some other arrangement of elements such that oxygen, or whatever allows one to breath there, is made more freely available.  In the meantime, I intend to give the only gift that I have to whichever smart kids might take something away from it.  This gift is simply the truthful and open record of what it has been like for one relatively smart kid to navigate life, relationships, and his own psychology and mentality–a primer on the basic aspects of living the first half of life as a semi-ambitious introverted intuitive living between centuries and shuttling between east and west.

Before any new journey can be set out upon, passage must be secured–I know this because I have dreamt it.  Possessing no riches of my own, the price of the new journey will have to be paid by the brokering of an inscription, a text, of the old one.  This text will necessarily be partial, incomplete, subject to criticism for what it redacts, a map that barely begins to reflect the territory as was the dream text itself, as are all dream texts.  This has to be accepted at the outset; after all even the holy writer is perpetually bound by the constraints of form.  And even as we are writing the record of our coming through that earlier landscape, the greater work of embodying the living word such that the opulent and decorative higher floors of our co-constructed mansion are made manifest through our participation in reverie and revelry, of ascending the far-flung mountains of a new Aeon, will already have begun.

Dedication:

For all the smart kids.

Works Cited/ Referenced:

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

Ecclesiastes.

Gerard Manly Hopkins, “Mind Has Mountains (No Worst, There is None).”

James Hollis, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path.

Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind.

Robert Johnson, He.

Carl Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche.

Van Morrison, “No Guru No Method, No Teacher.”

Phosphorescent, “Los Angeles,” from Here’s to Taking it Easy.

Phosphorescent, “Terror in the Canyons,” from Muchacho.

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrological Houses.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker.

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On Some Airports

Note: I’ve always found airports to be oddly compelling spaces — calmer than airplanes, yet charged with their own atmospheres, rhythms, and small absurdities. Despite their surface similarity, airports differ in subtle but meaningful ways: some feel tranquil and almost utopian (Singapore), others disorienting in their 24-hour casino glow (Dubai), some quietly efficient (Tampa), and others defined by faded infrastructure, endless construction, or simple forgettability. This piece, On Some Airports, is a deliberately unsystematic and anecdotal wander through a handful of terminals I’ve passed through over the years — less a ranking than a record of mood, memory, and the curious emotional geography of transit spaces that we occupy only briefly yet somehow remember for years.

I spend too much time in airplanes

Eating peanuts and getting high.

Dean Wareham

 

Generally speaking, airports are more pleasant than airplanes. I don’t mind airports. And despite my once upon a time claim that all airports are essentially the same space, well, that’s more of a metaphysical than a practical contention. Practically speaking the experience of airports does differ. What follows is a totally unsystematic, entirely anecdotal, non-ranking of some airports I’ve been to.

U.S. Airports:

LaGuardia (LGA) in New York is actually a pleasant surprise. Clean, minimal but sufficient food options, phone chargers in the seats, proximal to Manhattan. The folks at the coffee stand messed up like 15 orders in a row, but that’s OK. I forgive them.

Verdict: LGA is fine.

Newark Airport (EWR), on the other hand, is terrible. If I had the choice of sleeping in an outhouse or spending a day at EWR, I’d take EWR. But not by much. It’s a pit.

Verdict: EWR is terrible.

Seattle Airport (SEA) is poorly run. There’s been news about it. Compared to Portland (PDX), and admittedly smaller airport that is solid, or even San Francisco (SFO), an operation of greater complexity, SEA struggles. Maybe they’ve turned things around, but I doubt it.

Verdict: SEA sucks. PDX is solid. SFO is decent but could be cleaner.

The best experience I’ve had at a U.S. airport is Tampa (TPA). Now this is not a major hub, however I found it super convenient. I stayed in a hotel right in the terminal, security was a breeze, everything was efficient and sound. When folks say that U.S. airports suck, relatively speaking they are correct. Omit TPA from the list though. I like it.

Verdict: TPA is excellent.

O’Hare International Airport (ORD) in Chicago exemplifies the fall of the U.S. Basically. It’s not BAD, it’s just faded. Faded glory. U.S. public infrastructure is weak and everyone knows it. ORD is a case in point, but it’s survivable.

Verdict: ORD is OK.

The Los Angeles Airport (LAX) was under construction for like two decades. It’s probably still under construction. LAX is far from everything. It is not a destination airport, although it is major.

Verdict: LAX is f***ing far.

Airports Outside the U.S.:

Let’s get out of Milwaukee and we’ll talk about it.

Michael Clayton

The Singapore Airport (SIN) is everything it is cracked up to be. Singaporeans have a great deal of pride in their airport, but it’s totally justified. I find SIN tranquil in the extreme. They’ve got butterflies. The’ve got Indian food. They’ve got a great attached hotel. They’ve got nap rooms, showers, a gym. Security is omnipresent and unfelt. Sure you can call Singapore a soft-authoritarian state if you like. I could care.

Verdict: SIN is the best.

The Bangkok Airport (DMK), on the other hand, is not pleasant. Sinage is bad. Information is thin. Food options are minimal. It’s simultaneously packed and cavernous. I have not enjoyed my time here.

Verdict: DMK is bad.

The Dubai Airport (DXB) is strange. It’s a serious hub and runs 24/7 (as does DMK). Unlike DMK however, DXB has ample food and drink options and is pretty comfortable. The customs staff moves at their own pace, to say the least. The dichotomy between an (apparently) efficient and gleaming modern airport and a snail’s pace customs experience is interesting. DXB is lit and feels kind of like a casino in the sense that 3:30 AM feels like mid-afternoon. I have found DXB to be disconcerting in this respect, but otherwise perfectly pleasant.

Verdict: DXB is big and better than most.

Osaka’s Kansai International Airport (KIX) is decent before security and weak after. My buddy Doug loathes the neon lighting of the airport–this bothers me less. My issue is the food options after security leave a lot to be desired. Since this is my home airport, I am not in a position to give an objective reading. Security lines can get super long during peak hours, but usually it’s fine.

Verdict: KIX is so-so.

Osaka’s Itami Airport (ITM) has recently had a facelift. It’s marginally improved. Just because you have a Wolfgang Puck’s pizza place doesn’t mean you’ve got it made, baby. Wolfgang Puck is f***ing overrated. Also, you almost have to take a bus to get anywhere from ITM. Buses sucks.

Verdict: ITM is fair at best.

I’ve been to the airport in Kuala Lumpur (KUL) several times but I forget everything about it.

Verdict: KUL is unmemorable.

The Shanghai Pudong Airport (PVG) has super high ceilings. Obviously a lot of money has gone into it. There is a super long train ride from customs to the gates. And, you are most likely to get delayed or re-routed because of weather or something. The airport itself is fine.

Verdict: Prepare to be delayed from PVG.

The Adelaide Airport (ADL) is in Adelaide, Australia. I went there once. The restaurants in my hotel were closed because it was a Sunday. There was nowhere to eat in the whole city and only stoner kids were on the street. The next morning the streets were packed. Adelaide is super strange. I have no idea what the airport was like.

Verdict: Pack a lunch.

That’s all the airports I have off the top of my head. Obviously there are more. If you agree or disagree or want to pitch an airport for my consideration, please leave a comment!

Note: If you found this piece interesting, you may also enjoy “On Some Things I Find Interesting.” Available below. 

On Some Things I Find Interesting
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On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)

A hotel room: the same cell in a different city — clean towels, a window, and the sense of being contained but cared for

Mark Sandman, refracted

A haunted hotel room, unblessed, charged with static; objects shifting on their own.

The Church, refracted

New Note: On the kibbitzer (two b’s there Mr. Auto-Correct baby), I am re-printing certain select pieces for a little while while I work on another writing project. Today I am re-printing this piece on hotels. This piece has gone through several iterations over time, it is in fact probably my most heavily edited piece, and concerns the experience of staying at business hotels. In a way this is perhaps my very best piece in that it is one of only three that survive from my first blog Classical Sympathies, which I started in 2008, right around the time I began working to build the IB Course at our school. Of course given later (and earlier) events, this was no coincidence. Essentially, the blogs were, for lack of a better phrase “trauma blogs,” or, to put it more positively, recovery blogs. I like that–let’s stick with it. So this piece was about finding safety, physical and psychological, in a hotel room, while at the same time knowing, paradoxically, that hotels, especially fancy ones, are sometimes, or even often, the target of violence for various reasons.

Note: I have stayed in a number of such hotels over the years and engaged deeply with the room-space in each case. At this point, I am prepared to say that I am “good at” staying in hotels (an absurd claim that I advance nonetheless), and feel authorized to advance some notes toward a general hotel theory. Facility as a hotel guest though not exactly a marketable skill, has yielded some insights about the general, perhaps archetypal, nature of the modern hotel stay. Despite at this point considerable experience in the field, I continue to find the hotel experience at once comforting and bizarre, and hotel rooms, when properly apportioned, womb-like and exercising a specific and fascinating gravity. Also, the first draft of this piece was completed when Larry King was still alive.

This piece also mentions my “fugue state,” and it is true that as a PTSD response to childhood sexual abuse I would sometimes, more than once for sure, slip into a kind of state of taking automatic actions which I recall, but only somewhat. During these states I would arrange and re-arrange the room, the things in my bag, etc. in a way to place little reminders to myself in the future. It is a little hard to explain, however once again psychologically literate folks will follow along.

Finally, in my opinion, this is a pretty funny piece. Not as funny as Mason Anderson but still not bad. And it advances the absurd, yet still somehow defensible, position that I am “good at” staying in hotels. I hope you enjoy it.

Part I:

The TV was turned to CNN, which was focused on violence somewhere. I could not tell where. The experts in their suits and hairsprayed hair presented the conflict as if conflict was inevitable. They agreed it was happening now and could be prevented, but at the same time at the conclusion of the piece they smiled politely and signed off as if the violence was also occurring in a land so distant it might as well be the past.

Emily Maloney

I have stayed in quite a number of business hotels, in quite a number of countries. This piece provides, in essence, a sort of “psychograph” of the business hotel experience. Three features of business hotels that we may want to consider are: i) like airports, all business hotels share a single ethos, an un-pindownable character that feels, wherever one happens to be geographically speaking, of a piece; ii) the effect of the television offerings, in particular CNN International, on the business traveler, is one of overwhelming relaxation, bordering on complacency and even numbness; iii) as a corollary to i), it is far easier to enumerate how business hotels resemble one another than to lay out any salient differences.

Oddly, minor local variations only seem to further reinforce a central sameness. Checking into an 11th floor room at a classic example of the species, for instance the Numzau Tokyu Hotel, half an hour south of Tokyo, Japan, one is affected at once by that strangely pleasant fugue state, a state of mind almost exactly halfway between bliss and malaise, attendant on “business” hotels. Once inside a business hotel, especially those neither top-of-the-line nor quite down-and-out, one is confronted with a kind of disembodied space which seems at once connected to a global network of similar hotels (accomplished in part through the simultaneously soothing and hypnotizing effect of CNN International) and disconnected from the local environment. The traveler is sucked into global weirdness through a combination of the flat, post-political window of CNN, the persistent low hum of the air conditioner, and the anodyne staleness, almost spartan, quality of the decor.

Oddly, any “artwork” or decorative flourishes that a hotel room may possess only serves to further a sense of featurelessness; the art in question being almost exclusively of the most banal nature–bland seascapes, abstracts denuded of all edge or verve, and those odd non-paintings that, try as you might, you forget the second you exit your room. One has to remind oneself that a business trip means that there is work to be done–the TV, the slight high resulting from contact with the bowing attendants, the men in black, and the blushing young lady who carries your bag, the knowledge that your company is footing the bill–all this lulls you into a kind of sleep of the spirit.

Turning on the TV, you feel that you could spend years, lifetimes even, staring at CNN’s Larry King (the long-dessicated one), the post-racial female anchors who bring that special Code 46 feel of the non-overt future, or the exquisitely paralyzing “World Weather,” before awakening in another age, the Rip Van Winkle of the travel world. When CNN finally wears out its welcome, one’s choices of pay channels open up the fascinating worlds of…golf (the Golf Channel), silicone starlets (the Playboy Channel), intimate acts in close-up (the “adult channel”), and, most fittingly, drama set in outer space (the Battlstar Galatica channel). This profile of options, golf, softcore, hardcore, and outer space, the result, presumably, of reams of data on the tastes of business travelers like me, the mobile working male, I want to find depressing, but the menu has something beautifully efficient about it. Not wanting to get sucked into the anesthesizing vortex of any of these choices, I have to force myself to rise from the supine contemplation of the only-vaguely Chinese news anchor and move on with the day.

My senses are momentarily quickened by a report of an attack on a hotel in Pakistan: a horrific assault which has taken place at a Marriott in Islamabad. Oddly, the reality of this event quickly fades, and what Richard Todd calls the “non-ness” of the Marriott up the road strangely becomes the non-ness of violence–the attack in Islamabad conveys, through the lens of the CNN International, not exactly shock, but a continuing and deepening sense of global weirdness only slightly tinged by fear resting on the realization that as a business traveler in exactly this kind of hotel, I am the target. Oddly, this realization is not as disturbing as it ought to be: my fugue state is such that I am more in, more of, Islamabad than Numazu, but not wholly there either. Instead, I am poised somewhere between Islamabad and Battlestar Galactica, cavorting with post-racial android news anchors who bring me news of a planet this 11th floor, air-conditioned bubble of a non-space has left far behind.

Part II:

In part II of this essay will we delve a little deeper into the business hotel experience using as a lens “J.G. Ballard: Conversations.” Ballard probably needs no introduction, but for those who have yet to fall until his influence, he is the author of “Empire of the Sun” and “Crash” who wrote dozens of fantastic semi-Sci Fi short stories in the late 1950s and through the 1960s including “Prima Belladonna,” Thirteen to Centaurus,” and “The Terminal Beach.” Ballard novels, in my opinion, are not as uniformly satisfying as his short stories; at novel length his “obsessions,” beach resorts, empty swimming pools, gated communities, plastic surgery, car crashes, the interplay of sexuality and technology, tend to wear a little thin.

In “Conversations,” Ballard offers the following defense of his insularity and thematic repetition: “I think the values of bourgeois society by and large have triumphed. We’re living in a world where people at the age of 22 and 23 are thinking about their mortgages. It is a fact, and there’s nothing much on can do about it, except cultivate one’s obsessions and one’s own imagination” (144), but this approach works better in his short stories (which Ballard has not written for nearly two decades now), where his limited set of concerns are reflected and replayed through a panoply of settings and situations such that he resembles a virtuoso musician building off of certain stable base elements to create endless riffs and improvisations.

As a boy, Ballard was, famously, incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai, and this formative experience informs both his autobiographical “Empire of the Sun” and his short stories. But instead of literal prisons with externally imposed walls and limitations, Ballard’s characters seem over and over again to be immured within prisons of their own creation. Story after story features some variation on one of two related themes; scientists careening off on private quests that eventually destroy them or people seemingly sequestered or restrained who turn out to be acting in psychic complicity with their imprisonment. Ballard himself admits to the centrality of the prison experience in “Conversations” when Mark Pauline asks him “Writing Empire of the Sun hasn’t helped you forget those horrible years in the camp” and Ballard responds “But I’ve been writing about it all the time–I just wrote about it in disguise” (138).

“J.G. Ballard: Conversations” was overseen by one V. Vale, who, to all appearances, is a full-fledged Ballard maniac, and contains a number of Vale’s telephone conversations with Ballard and other Ballardians including the composer Graeme Revell and Ballard archivist, David Pringle. Ballard has a lot to say about that particular semi-reality fugue state described in my earlier post. As noted above, Ballard has a special fascination with self-imposed psychic incarceration: “I have a nightmare vision of a gated community of extremely expensive houses inside a larger gated community. It’s bizarre” (72). Ballard is also concerned with the dual themes of self-immurement and the mind-meld that occurs between the individual and their media systems. These two themes may not seem to be obviously related, but after reading 300 pages of Ballard on the telephone, all of his particular obsessions do seem intertwined, and connect with my experience of staying in business hotels. Take for example Ballard on why Surrealism no longer obtains:

“Classical surrealism, beginning after the First World War, made a very clear distinction between the outer world of reality {…} and the inner world of imagination {…} But after the Second World War, particularly as the media landscape developed enormously–thanks to television, mass advertising and the whole consumer goods landscape–the distinction between our reality and inner fantasy began to break down {…} This means that it’s very difficult to maintain the dichotomy, that contrast that the Surrealists required {…} As I’ve said before, in the last 20 years if you stop somebody in the street and ask the time, you might look at a watch with Mickey Mouse on the dial {…} It cuts the ground from under classical Surrealism” (166).

When viewing CNN International at a business hotel, I realize, pace Ballard, that the world as reflected does have aspects of the surreal, especially in the consummately inoffensive manner in which it presents horrific international incidents interlaced with “the exquisitely paralyzing World Weather” and 9-ball tournaments from Bangkok replayed several times a day. This approach effectively colonizes my own imagination by rendering the unthreatening creepy and and the unbearable passe.

The oddest thing about CNN International is that the news itself is actually not all that bad. Real news about real, important, global events, comes across the airwaves, but it gets somehow stripped on much of its impact through the presentation. Ballard in 1991: “We get the Newzak all the time. It’s been homogenized, trivialized, and there’s too much filler added to smooth it down so that it comes out like paste from a tube” (178). It’s not that the news isn’t there, it’s just that, pace Ballard, there is no room for either surrealism or real impact. Ballard explains that the Dali/ Bunuel films (Un chien andalou and L’ Âge d’or), so shocking at the time, would not work today: “The sight of people dragging dead donkeys through a dining room would {seem to be} some sort of advertising stunt–a beer commercial” (166). Here is David Pringle on why Ballard is not a Marxist:

“Ballard, being a good Freudian, is much more interested in the individual’s–yours and mine–collusion with what’s going on, our secret wishes, that in the idea of conspiracy–that there are conspiratorial entities out there trying to ‘get us’ {…} Ballard asks, ‘What are you out to do to yourself? What are you own darkest wishes? What are we all doing to ourselves collectively?'” (226).

Ballard also writes “I accept the Surrealist formula: the need to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible, to remake the world around us by the power of one’s imagination, which after all is all we’ve got. I mean, the central nervous system is faced with a world of Mariott hotels and ex-actors turned world leaders, dangerous medicines and you name it. The individual central nervous system can only attempt to make sense of this” (276).

Eventually, if she has even the slightest modicum of self-awareness, the business traveler comes face to face with Ballard’s question: “‘What are you out to do to yourself? What are you own darkest wishes? What are we all doing to ourselves collectively?’ This is because the enervating lassitudinal comfort of your standard Mariott is, in the worst possible sense, addictive. When you begin to run down the list of hotel features: airport pickup, bowing attendants, elevators, room service, air conditioning, permanently locked windows, security barrier, ubiquitous carpeting, fresh towels and soap, overpriced but almost appetizing meals, pool and hot tub, 9-ball on a loop, world weather, all these items add up to a simulacrum of a total existence that very quickly begins to edge out the rest of the world–there is no need to leave the compound and submission to the soft tyranny of over-priced conveniences sets in almost immediately.

At the same time, CNN International allows the illusion of connectedness while in fact only furthering one’s suspension in the high-rise ether of the business hotel complex. “One has the illusion you’ve seen a place in fact when you haven’t seen it at all. All you’ve seen are the airports and the hotels” (288). Ballard here hints at something I have long felt to be the case: all airports actually belong to a single country, and the vast majority of business hotels likewise sit uneasily within their supposed national confines; they are more like each other than they are like the buildings or community around them. The overpriced airport hotel in Tokyo resembles nothing so much as the overpriced airport hotel in Vancouver, which in turn is the kissing cousin of the airport hotel in Beijing, etc. Here again, local differences only seem to accentuate a basic central identicalness.

Ballard again: “People use mental formulas that they’ve learned from TV. Even in ordinary conversation, if you’re talking to the mechanic at the garage about whether you need new tires for your car, you and he probably talk in a way that his equivalent thirty years ago would never have done. You use–not catch phrases but verbal formulas. Suddenly you realize you’re hearing echoes of some public-information, accident-prevention commercial. It’s uncanny” (83).

(Ballard has the strange habit of ending thought after thought with “It’s bizarre;” “It’s strange;” “It’s uncanny”–this verbal tick serves as a running indicator of the way that Ballard sees the world and helps explain how, over the course of a novel, he can focus on a certain object, a tennis machine for example, or swimming pool, with such relentless obsessed focus that the formerly normal becomes invested with a kind of pathological creepiness that entirely transcends simplistic one-to-one correlative symbolism.)

Ballard’s central point here hints again at the colonizing power of certain ideas and turns of phrases which seep into our everyday speech, tempered only by feeble attempts to ironize. Thus, when in the course of normal conversation one refers to a storm as “an extreme climatological event,” to a sign as “singage,” or to a car crash as “a simultaenous intersection of vehicular components” the use of such terms, although masked with a patina of apparently self-knowing irony is still, in its own way, perfectly sincere. Here, submission to the linguistic idiocy of corporate non-speak marries submission to the blissful “non-ness” of the business hotel, a paradise of our own collective fantasy where the towels are always clean, the windows are always closed, and 9-ball is always on.

Dedication: For the APA chain. I know it’s kind of a cult, but man are they reasonable, conveniently located, and comfy.

Works Cited:

J.G. Ballard, J.G. Ballard: Conversations, ed. V. Vale (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 2005).

Emily Maloney, from an essay in an early-2000s political anthology (exact source lost to time)

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Why It Is So Hard to Get Breakfast in Japan (with a dream cameo from the Gemini Donald Trump)

New Note (2025): Since this piece was first published, Japanese Breakfast the band has gotten even bigger, Michelle Zauner wrote another book, and the cultural universe has shifted enough times that some aspects of this essay may be outdated. I’ve kept the original text intact because the dream-logic and breakfast-logic still stand.

I live in Kyoto, Japan, and after many years here I’ve traveled pretty widely—especially in the greater Tokyo area. Traveling in Japan is pretty easy as long as you can manage a little spoken Japanese and read a train map. The trains are famously efficient and connect most of the country, including every major city.

I haven’t driven a car here in more than fifteen years and don’t miss it at all. Trains and taxis get the job done just fine. Overall, I love traveling in Japan and I love exploring Tokyo, a city that contains worlds within worlds. I have almost no complaints about Japanese travel.

Except for one.

It is nearly impossible to get a good breakfast—or really any breakfast—when you’re on the road.

Now, it’s not that Japanese people don’t eat breakfast. They do. The archetypal morning meal—rice, miso soup, maybe a little fish—is as recognizable in its way as the “full English” of sausages and beans. But the Japanese breakfast is overwhelmingly a home operation. Once you’re traveling, the options narrow to two—two and a half, if we’re being generous.

I. The Hotel Breakfast

Mid-price and nicer hotels usually offer a breakfast buffet with “Japanese” (rice, miso, maybe grilled fish) and “Western” (toast, jam, and some ambivalent eggs) selections. Except at the truly top-tier hotels, these buffets manage to be both overpriced and bad. A traveler is lucky to escape for ¥1,500–¥1,800 (about fifteen dollars before the yen weakened), and more commonly pays north of ¥2,000 for a pretty uninspired spread.

Budget hotels often don’t offer breakfast at all.

In my experience, Japanese hotel breakfasts are among the weakest anywhere in the world. I take this as symptomatic of a broader truth: Japanese people simply don’t care about breakfast when they’re on the road—and maybe not all that much at home either.

II. The Convenience Store (“Combini”) Breakfast

When I have raised the issue of the lack of decent breakfast in Japan, Japanese people usually point me to the convenience store. And it’s true: you can purchase food and coffee at any of the ubiquitous combinis—Family Mart, 7/11, Daily, Lawson, and the rest. They’re open 24 hours, and they stock a range of items that theoretically qualify as breakfast. Hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, rice balls, steamed buns, fried chicken, sometimes bananas, and of course hot and cold coffee.

I’ve certainly been in situations where I had no choice but to fall back on the combini for breakfast while traveling. And this is…fine, to an extent. But most combinis have nowhere to actually sit and eat, and in any case you can’t really call a combini breakfast nice.

Most Japanese folks seem to regard a combini breakfast as perfectly acceptable—desirable even. And while one can admire the low expectations, or the cultural pragmatism behind them, it’s possible to admire those qualities and still wish for more.

III. Starbucks or a Local Coffee Shop

Starbucks are fairly common in major cities and usually open at 7 a.m. (if you’re lucky) or, more commonly, 8 a.m. They should really open at 6. The food offerings are overpriced, and Starbucks has never truly figured out its food—which remains baffling. Still, one can grab a few combini items and smuggle them in, or settle for a four-dollar fragment of quiche with your Americano. I would not classify Starbucks as having breakfast, per se, but they are pleasant enough to sit in, and one can create a simulacrum of breakfast there.

Then there are the local coffee shops. These, fortunately, often open at 7 a.m. or even earlier, and serve strong coffee—often brewed by hand at the counter with a drip filter—and a breakfast that nearly always consists of a single piece of white toast and an egg. White toast, egg, and handmade coffee with old guys reading the paper around you is, I admit, at least an approximation of breakfast, and I have certainly relied on this setup while on the road.

But it’s still not quite what we are looking for if we want a hearty, balanced breakfast. There is no French toast, no fruit bowl, no omelette, and only very occasionally a strip of bacon. None of the staples one might reasonably expect from a decent, full breakfast.

And that’s more or less the list. You can also find 24-hour beef-bowl restaurants, but they are cheap as and not exactly the sort of thing you look forward to when greeting the day. Beyond that, most restaurants simply don’t open until 11:00 or 11:30 for lunch. The concept of brunch—dicey even under ideal circumstances—barely exists outside the swankiest of upmarket hotels.

It is, put bluntly, really hard to find a proper breakfast in Japan unless you make it yourself. And that fact continues to puzzle me. I understand that most people here eat rice and miso at home, or grab something at the convenience store. Fine. But metropolitan Tokyo has roughly 30 million people. None of these 30 million want a real breakfast at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m.? Not even a few hundred thousand?

It seems incomprehensible. And yet, incomprehensible or not, this is simply the reality. There is no broad Japanese market for breakfast. I mean, I’m in the market—but apparently one man does not a demographic make.

Go figure.

Now, I’ve covered the issue of Japanese breakfast—its scarcity, its odd cultural positioning—to the best of my ability. But before we move on, I want to add a few details that may seem unrelated. Let’s see if we can get them to connect.

Because the truth is, I dream about getting breakfast in Japan. And in a surprising number of these dreams, the Trumpster shows up.

More precisely: the dreams focus on the fact that the Trumpster and I share a birthday (June 14th), which makes us both late Geminis. Late Geminis, I have good reason to believe, are uniquely dangerous and slippery. But in my dreams the Trumpster isn’t dangerous at all. He shows up as basically an empty suit.

Trump/ Breakfast Dream I:

I am at a breakfast buffet in Japan. This is at a hotel that I am not staying at, and I may indeed be attempting to crash the buffet while masquerading as a hotel guest. Trump is there with an entourage, and he sees me staking out the buffet. I make a comment to him that we are both late Gemini, and he nods, curtly but with some minimal consideration. He sees me trying to steal the breakfast, does not care, and would probably provide cover if it came to that. He and I are not aligned, but nor are we enemies.

Trump/ Breakfast Dream II:

I am outside in the morning, standing on a dock or something of that nature. I am looking for breakfast, and not finding it. There is a commotion above me to the east, and I realize that Trump is being rolled out, literally on like coaster wheels, for a speech. He is on some kind of sliding seat and when this seat hits the balcony he stands up and postures about like Mussolini. I am watching and he sees me watching, but continues with his Mussolini act. I realize quickly that this is a total act and that he doesn’t even want to be there. He is not dangerous in this moment or in this speech, just faintly ridiculous. Still, no breakfast.

=====

What do Trump and breakfast have to do with one another? I’m not sure yet. But I do know that Trump, although maligned by nearly everyone I know (I know a bunch of liberals), and apart from being an egotistical, mafia-adjacent, easily flattered, shape-shifting sociopath, is also pretty funny. Before I lose half of my readership, I’ll just nod to the comedian Shane Gillis, who made this point several months after Trump left office.

Has enough time passed that we can admit Trump was funny? Can we finally admit that he was funny? (…) He was funny (…) I saw it. I’d show my friends I’d say look at that. They’d be like “what?”

“It’s funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about Donald Trump.”

I don’t know, during Hurricane Dorian he was like “maybe we should nuke it” (…) Like that was a real suggestion from the President (…) “Hey we got a big storm coming, you want me to blow it up?”

They were like “no, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I don’t know, I fuck around dude. It’s what I do.”

“I fuck around, it’s what I do,” is a great summary of Trump’s whole approach to governing. Now, is there anything funny about his terrible immigration policies, his attempted pressure of the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 1800 votes, his total disregard of democratic norms? No, not really. But is there anything funny about his speculation that maybe a little light and a little bleach could cure COVID? Why yes, there is. Is there anything funny about his noting that Frederick Douglas is getting bigger and bigger these days? Yes indeed. Is the way he pronounces “huge” funny? It’s funny to me anyway. And in my dreams, the two above being part of a series of about four or five total Trump breakfast dreams, he always shows up as semi-defanged, basically neutered, and non-dangerous. I think this is because, as a fellow late Gemini, I kind of have Trump’s number. It takes a late Gemini to know one, and I know this guy. In fact, I see right through him, to the extent that I know he’s not even there.

One other salient piece of data, there is an indie rock band called Japanese Breakfast that is getting bigger and bigger these days (they tell me “sir, this Japanese Breakfast is getting bigger and bigger these days, and I say look at that, wow, this Japanese Breakfast is really getting huge”). I don’t know them that well, but they sound like the kind of band I would like. I do wonder though if their name is not an ironic nod to the fact that Japanese breakfast is not a thing. Is the band name self-effacing, or even self-erasing? Does Japanese Breakfast the band exist at all? Does Trump? There is a way in which the Trump presidential term has come to feel like a fever dream or collective delusion, a set of events that cannot really have occurred as we recall them. In this sense, the Trump presidency may in the future be subject to Phantom Time Hypothesis speculation. And he and his handlers have already played right into this speculation what with their first lady doubles, the totally unhinged press conferences with the ubiquitous helicopter waiting in the wings, and the classic Trumpism, “we’ll see what happens.”

Here is what I think. Japanese Breakfast as a band exists. The Trumpster exists, but his wife spent most of her time in the White House being doubled. Trump and I are dream doubles, and I have his number. Japanese people don’t care about breakfast. And I am always starving at around 9 AM when on the road in Japan. Someone should look into the matter. I hear the Trumpster is free these days, maybe he’s the guy for the job.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with American politics, albeit from a slightly different angle.

https://thekyotokibbitzer.wordpress.com/2025/11/25/on-the-federal-age-of-consent-a-reply-to-alan-dershowitz/

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