Because of the lack of a practical internet connection at the hotel, I’m trying a blog editor that works off-line as well as on. I’m trying MarsEdit at brother Joel’s suggestion. So far so good.

Also, I’ve been thinking about the structure of the blog and I’m going to add some more categories (I have already done a bit of this). I’m wanting to set up a “review” category where I will write impressions and thoughts about various movies, books, products etc. So, for example, in a few days, you might see a “review” of MarsEdit. We’ll see if that works out.

Wandered around Melbourne in the rain yesterday afternoon. I’m trying to find the Hotel that Akiko and Suzuki stayed in when we were here 15 years ago. It was the kind of place that was impossible to miss, and now I can’t find it. Can’t remember what it was called. Anyway the act of simply walking around like I was dousing for water, hoping to have little tugs on my memory pull me there was interesting if unproductive. I kept having little sparks of memory and heading off in different directions but I still haven’t found it. I’m going to have to ask Akiko if she has a record of what it was called.

I like walking around cities, and Melbourne is great for it. There’s a lot of thought about public space, and a vigorous mish-mash of culture that leads to a kind of Blade Runner feeling. I love this sensibility, and of course it was accentuated by the rain. A clean, recently refurbished Blade Runner L.A. I slip effortlessly into hard-boiled detective mode as I’m walking around. Funny how attractive dystopian sensibilities become. Maybe that’s their function. The L.A. of Blade Runner is not a pretty place, but Ridley Scott shoots it in a way that finds it’s beauty. Like my old friend Tom Blair once said about Sid and Nancy “a beautiful film about an ugly subject.”
When I lived in Tokyo, I would spend hours on the streets in Shinjuku, Ikebukuro and Shibuya, just wandering around soaking up the neon. Riding my motorcycle through it would only intensify the feeling. Like riding a spinner in Blade Runner or the big bike chase at the beginning of Akira. It’s why, although I know it’s politically incorrect, I love hanging around the new, neon 42nd Street in New York. I feel charged up by that energy. I know it’s probably hastening the destruction of the biome that supports us, but human folly has always had it’s beautiful side. Like the spectrum of colors in an oil spill.

Back in Melbourne, I walked past a peepshow/porn shop and they had a big CRT with advertising imagery running in the window surrounded by the normal kind of neon. What struck me about it was that the imagery wasn’t sexual or suggestive at all. It was mostly text based. And the kinds of words that they were using were: “Cheeky” and “Naughty”. I realize that this only seems strange to me because I’m a speaker of American English, but it really seemed funny. To me those words suggest that what is going on inside is akin to a Junior High-School comedy night or something. Of course, things like this always make me think about what Australians find funny or incongruous when they’re in the States. I mean we do run around talking about putting things in our “fanny-packs” and what not, but there is probably a good deal of public English in the United States that is perfectly embarrassing.