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Scultz: I always thought of you as an Aryan.
The Barber: I'm a vegetarian. Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit. Robert Lowell, Memories of West Street and Lepke
"Don't you know that meat is murder?",
The dippy hippy cried.
So, I hit him with a leg of lamb -
And sure enough,
he died. Other Theresa, Vegetarian Poem
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Let me confess!
A languid love for Lilies does not blight me!
Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me!
I do not care for dirty greens
By any means.
I do not long for all one sees
That's Japanese.
…
Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite
your languid spleen,
An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-
too-French French bean! Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen
I, a virgin, can make my frank boast that I communicate to no mortal man my secret counsels except to such as I have chosen on account of their taciturnity; then, if these secrets are later discovered, I know whom to accuse. Elizabeth I
Unknown to trade, to travel, almost to geography, the manner of life they harbour is an unsolved secret. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer
Music and mushrooms:
two words next to one
another in many dictionaries.
Where did he
write The Three-Penny Opera?
Now he's
buried below the grass at the
foot of High Tor.
Once the season changes
from summer to fall,
given sufficient rain,
or just the
mysterious dampness that's in the
earth, mushrooms
grow there,
carrying on, I
am sure, his
business of working with
sounds.
That we
have no ears to hear the
music the spores shot off
from basidia make obliges us
to busy ourselves microphonically. John Cage, Indeterminacy
All aikido arts are secret in nature and are not to be revealed publicly nor taught to rogues who will use them for evil purposes. Morihei Ueshiba, Budo
Matsutake are a type of Japanese mushroom. They are quite rare. They have a special fragrance. They are very, very expensive. Domestic Japanese matsutake are about $100 for 100g now. A dollar a gram. Imported ones are much cheaper. Japan now imports many products traditionally thought of as Japanese from other countries. Especially from other Asian
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I live alone, wounded by iron,
Struck by a sword, tired of battle-work,
Weary of blades. Often I see war,
Fight a fearsome foe. I crave no comfort,
That safety might come to me out of the war-strife
Before I among men perish completely.
But the forged brands strike me,
Hard-edged and fiercely sharp, the handwork of smiths,
They bite me in the strongholds. I must wait for
A more murderous meeting. Never a physician
In the battlefield could I find
One of those who with herbs healed wounds
But my sword slashes grow greater
Through death blows day and night.
impressions
An extra post this week about weapons. It is one of the riddles from The Exeter Book put into modern English. There is only one surviving manuscript. It contains 94 riddles. It's a simple, powerful poem. Those adjectives are both from Latin. It's also short, stark and blunt. Those adjectives are all from Old English.
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street T S Eliot, The Boston Evening Transcript
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning. Dylan Thomas, Poem in October
To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U turn, I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning. Margaret Thatcher, speech to the Conservative Party Conference, 10 October 1980
Revenge is a dish best served raw Tagline for the movie Sushi Girl
Well done boys, looks like ice-cold sushi for breakfast Skipper the Penguin, Madagascar
One minute you're on top, the next you're sushi. Morgana, Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea
We use the word kaiten in the martial arts. It means turning or rotation. One of the basic techniques in aikido is kaiten nage - turning throw.
Kaiten zushi is the sushi that goes around on a conveyor belt.
The apprenticeship of a sushi chef takes many years. The fish must be of very good quality so that it can be eaten raw. So sushi in a traditional restaurant can be very, very expensive.
There was a national holiday this weekend and like a lot of families in Japan we went
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And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows,
heavy shadows against light shadows - it has nothing else Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
We lingered wordless while a tall
Shade enclouded the shadow's cast. Allen Tate, Shadow and Shade
The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. Frank Lloyd Wright (architect), Night is but a Shadow Cast by the Sun
The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall,
Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,
Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space. John Ashbery, Forties Flick
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow T S Eliot, The Hollow Men
Recently I saw an interesting profile of an American architect. He lives and works in Kyoto. His name is Geoffrey P Moussas. One of his interests is renovating machiya. Machiya are traditional Japanese town houses. The results are very beautiful. Check out the Design 1st site.
He became interested in Japanese architecture after reading In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. He said that in his architecture studies he had been learning how to use light. But after reading the book he realized that there was another approach. In Japan people used shadow.
I thought it was very interesting. Looking at the same thing f
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Where's the mountain I 've just come down?
Where am I? Ko Un, Walking Down a Mountain
Even if you know the way, ask one more time. Korean proverb
There has been a Korean boom in Japan for a few years. It started with a TV drama series called Winter Sonata in 2002. Then one or two Korean pop artists released songs in Japanese. Now there are many, many popular Korean singers and groups.
There are a lot of Korean restaurants and shops selling Korean music and related goods near Shin-Okubo station in Tokyo. It used to be a dying area. Especially during the day. At night it was perhaps a little busier because it is close to some of the Shinjuku entertainment areas. But in the last couple of years it has become a bustling shopping area. Most of the people who go there now are very, very young. They are fans of Korean pop idols and actors. I have to say that Korean movies are usually much more realistic than Japanese movies.
Shin-Okubo is quite near the Aikikai hombu dojo. And it's the closest station to the Iwata budo supply store. I wrote about the store in Iwata. It's where I get all my aikido uniforms: aikidogi and hakama.
It's nice to see an old decaying area become revitalized.
When I went to Korea years ago there was no aikido. Not even one dojo. I think there are a few there now. But I did go to a hapkido dojo. Hapkido is written with the same three Chinese characters as aikido. 合気道. It'
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