Elves, by Kir-Tat

Recently I commissioned Kir-Tat to illustrate one of the Elves stories. She chose this one, and… well, her results blew me away. I don’t think I could have asked for a more perfect painting to accompany the series. It’s gorgeously atmospheric, to the point that the scene almost soaks up the characters themselves. When I saw it, I literally started babbling about how amazingly well it came out. I’m not even going to talk about it anymore; I’m just going to let you see for yourself.

The Man and His Wisdom

When I was seven years old, I learned from Clint Eastwood never to put ketchup on a hot dog. It was sound advice, and I’ve never regretted listening to him.

So, on this fundamental, childhood level, invoking little things that changed my life, there’s something fantastic about walking through a bookstore and seeing a book titled Wisdom with the man himself on the cover. I love it. It’s one part photobook, one part essay collection, and I really do think it deserves its title. Neither Morgan Freeman nor Patrick Stewart appears, which does disappoint me a little bit (Stewart may be just a few years on the young end of the project’s scope), but overall I very much enjoyed my time with it, and I’ll be buying a copy soon. The book’s website has a great trailer, which sums up the book better than I could.

Part of Mr. Eastwood’s entry, particularly, caught my attention, so I copied it down to share with you here:

Take your profession seriously; don’t take yourself seriously. Don’t take yourself seriously in the process, because you really only matter to a certain degree in the whole circus out there. If you take yourself seriously you’re not going to be able to move forward and use your best artistic instincts. You’re going to be hampered by always wanting to look in the mirror and see if you have enough tuna oil in your hair or something like that.

I don’t think anyone would regret listening to that, either.

$4.25 for a what?

Living in the United States, breadbasket (and corn bushel) of the world that it is, it’s really easy to get used to the idea that food is cheap. Just looking at my weekly Safeway circular, I see whole chickens for $1.69/pound (buy one get another free), pork ribs for $1.79/pound, apples for 99¢/pound, and oranges practically there for the taking ($2.99 for an 8 pound bag). Part of this, I’m sure, is that I live in California, specifically, land of fruits and nuts that it is, but the basic premise remains.

Compare this to Japan, where an apple costs at least ¥398 (about $4.25 at time of this writing). That’s one apple. You can see it off to the right. It’s a beautiful apple, uniformly frosted red all around, and it’s pretty big big enough to make me spread my fingers a bit when I hold it, but it’s just one apple all the same.

Truly, I live in a land of plenty.

On the other hand, I wonder sometimes if we pay something for that abundance. It’s easy to think of food as a commodity, to think that one apple is the same as another, but that really isn’t the case. Food is a biological product, the end-result of some living thing and the environment around it, its lineage, handling, and care. For example, the Red Delicious is very red, but it’s only nominally delicious, because it’s been bred to be harvested early, in enormous quantities, and trucked across the continent. On the other end of the spectrum, Japanese farmers have made a science out of growing delicious, picture-perfect apples. That apple was simply better, crisper, sweeter, and better-balanced than anything I’ve ever bought at Safeway (or Whole Paycheck, for that matter, or even farmer’s markets and freeway-side stands), and I would love the chance to indulge in more, if only once in a while. At $4.25 each, Japanese apples could get almost as expensive as a bad Starbuck’s habit.

In Japan, though, that was more-or-less a standard apple, and by Japanese standards, it was quite reasonably priced. I found apples just like mine in every grocery store I visited, at train station fruit vendors, and sometimes in department stores and even 7-11s. Japanese consumers expect apples of that quality, and they’re willing to pay for them, so there are no cheap apples, only precious, semi-rare treats. Here in the United States, I’m guessing, we don’t and aren’t, so apples are cheap and plentiful, everyday in every meaning of the word.

I wonder, what does this say about them? What does it say about us?

First and Last and Always

For Hannah, because she made a difference.

Even with his heart pounding in time to the DJ’s command, a hundred and twenty-six beats per minute, Jamie could feel the one it skipped. Someone was watching him; he’d felt it, uncoiling a tight, nervous desire from the base of his spine, sliding it up his back until it made the hairs on his neck stand on end and his knees go weak, made him excited and just a little scared.

For months he’d walked past the door here, stolen glances past the curtain at the slender, pretty boys dancing together here, taking each other home, but he’d never dared step in before. Now he wasn’t sure whether he should have come. Someone would notice him; someone would tell; people would know; they would be polite of course, nothing overt. It was the twenty-first century after all, but he would hear their whispers, notice their sideways glances in his direction, and he would move again, unable to cope, unwilling to be that token friend, unwilling to be treated so differently. It wasn’t his fault he’d been born this way.

But there was that look. It promised so much.

Mistaken Identity in Modern Japan

I’ve been in Japan for the past week and change now, and I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to post. It’s been a wonderful experience, and I hope to come back in the future.

A detective stopped me in the Akihabara police station and asked to see my identification, but he seemed to lose interest almost immediately once I took it out, and he only gave it a cursory glance-over. I couldn’t understand why he did that, until later when I was fishing around for my rail pass. If I have a particularly large load in my upper left pockets, I realized, my jacket makes it look a little like I’m wearing a shoulder holster. Handguns are highly illegal in Japan, so naturally I think he felt compelled to investigate. Really that was a very clever trick – he stood off to the side slightly while I did this, enough to get a look into my jacket and see that the bulge was just a pocket full of wallet, papers, and other random bits that tourists pick up. It stayed low-key, he was in full control the whole time, and I didn’t even realize he thought something was wrong until much afterwards.

A few days later, on a much lighter note, I visited an onsen bath, about an hour south of Tokyo proper. The hostess mistook me for a girl at first and nearly handed me a key to the women’s locker room. She caught herself in time. It’s not the first time that’s happened to me, and I’m used to laughing it off (really I think it’s a nice sort of compliment).

It’s been a little bit of a whirlwind overview tour, and I’m still a bit shocked that it’s coming to an end. Right now it’s some ungodly-o-clock and I’ve been traveling all day, so I’ll post more pictures when I get a chance.