by Rudy Rucker
There was amplified music, unbelievably loud, playing saccharine disco-type tunes, with many words in English. "Party in Puroland, everybody party!" Down on the floor below were people in costumes marching around and around in the circle of an endless parade. One of them was dressed like Hello Kitty. I couldn't pause to look at first, as young guards in white gloves kept waving me on. I wound up and down flight after flight of undulating stairs, with all the guardrails lined by parents holding young children.
Finally I found a stopping place down near the floor. In the middle of the floor was a central structure like a giant redwood, bedizened with lights, smoke machines, and mechanical bubble blowers. The colored lights glistened on the bubbles in the thick air as the disco roared. "Party in Puroland!" Hello Kitty was twenty feet from me, and next to her was a girl in gold bathing suit and cape, smiling and dancing. But . . . if this was like Disneyland, where were the rides?
I stumbled off down an empty hall that led away from the spectacle. Behind glass cases were sculptures of laughing trees making candy. And here were a cluster of candy stores, and stores selling Hello Kitty products. I felt sorry for the parents leading their children around in the hideous saccharine din of this virtual reality gone wrong.
I made it back out into the fresh air and walked back to the "A-Life World" show. After the stench and noise and visual assault of Puroland, I couldn't look at the weird A-life videos anymore. But
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the realtime computer simulations were still okay. They were really alive, they had their gnarl and sex and death.
That evening, Mr. Arima, Mr. Onouchi, and Mr. Takahashi treated us to a great dinner in a Roppongi restaurant. These were the guys from Humanmedia organizing my gigs. Mr. Arima delivers one of his rare English sentences, "Mr. Onouchi is a heavy drinker." Mr. Onouchi snaps, "I don't think so," and a minute later knocks the sake bottle off the table. Mr. Arima's hair is wavy from a perm, and there are white cat hairs on his green suit. Sometimes he wears gray pants with white lines on them. When you talk to him, his lips purse out, and if he smiles, one dancing front tooth is at an angle. His oval-lensed wire glasses slide down on his nose. He's cute and touching. The dinner featured a soup called Frofuki Daikon, or steambath radish.
After dinner, Audrey, Ida and I walked around; this is the hippie part of town, the only place you see Westerners. On a big video screen over the street there is the music video of Billy Idol's song "Cyberpunk." In front of us, men in white gloves are digging a ditch and putting up little flashing lights. Billy's chest bursts open and shows wires. The men in white gloves gesture, waving on the passersby.
August 9, 1993. Shape Culture.
The next gig was in Osaka, home of my then-favorite band Shonen Knife, not that we saw them. Once a Mondo 2000 interviewer asked Shonen Knife if they were like Hello Kitty, and the answer was, "No, Hello Kitty has no mouth. We have big mouth, we are loud."
My talk was for something called the Society of Shape Culture, which turned out to be just what they sounded like: people interested in unusual shapes. They were big buffs on the fourth dimension. They wanted to know what shape I was hoping to see when I programmed my Boppers program to show artificial flocks of birds, and that was, really, the right question, as it was exactly the beautiful living scarf shape of a flock that I'd wanted to see so much that I slogged through all that code.
I used my color laptop at all of my Japanese demos, showing up with my "axe" and plugging in to whatever kind of display amp they had. At the Shape Culture demo there was a nice big projection screen, but it was keyed to work off a computer in a back room, and
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A simulated flock of birds.
(Image generated by Boppers.)
when I wanted to change my images, I had to leave the dais and go into the back room, still talking over my remote mike.
After the Shape Culture talk, we all sat around a table made of five pushed-together tables and drank beer and ate sushi that they brought. There was a Buddhist monk yelling about the fourth dimension and showing off his wire models of some polytope, he had four of them and said one was point-centered, one line-centered, one face-centered, and one solid-centered. Nobody could understand the details, but the shapes were great. Another was an origami master. Another a maker of paper hyperspace models. Many of them interested in mysticism. It was a wonderful feeling, a magical afternoon.
Everyone introduced themselves after we'd been eating and drinking for awhile at the Shape Culture luncheon. A heavy student with thick glasses says, "I am a graduate student and have not discovered anything yet." He smiles and rubs his hands as vigorously as if he were washing them. "But I want to!"
August 10, 1993. Dinner in Kyoto.
We move on to Kyoto for a signing in a bookstore. The evening of the first day in Kyoto we have the best dinner of all. It's raining due
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to what the papers called "Typhoon Number Seven." On the way to the dinner, we see a haiku out the taxi window:
In Kyoto a woman in a green kimono walks on clogs in the typhoon rain.
We use new-bought umbrellas to wind down the back streets to the restaurant which is known to our host Mr. Mori from his having gone to university in Kyoto. A plumpish juicy woman in a brilliant blue kimono serves our dinner. She comes in to the room and kneels right away, somehow making me, pig that I am, think of a porno video, only this isn't porno, she's the dignified wife of the owner/chef. I'm excited to see this strange, immaculate woman kneel. She has a mole on her face somewhere. Her lipstick is fresh and bright red. She smiles and speaks to us in English. She is proud of the room we are eating in, her husband the cook is also a carpenter, he built this room, the air smells like incense from the fresh wood. On one wall is paper printed in clouds from a 16th Century woodblock. Mr. Arima and Mr. Mori order hot and cold sake, plus an endless stream of big Sapporo beers. The cold sake comes in beautiful glass bottles that are shaped like two spherical bulbs, the top one smaller than the bottom one. The glass bottles sit in chipped ice and have vines around them. The hot sake is in raku. You always have to pour for other people instead of taking for yourself. Ida keeps Mr. Arima's glass full and starts giggling. Mr. Arima eventually leaves to go to the bathroom. When you go to the bathroom you put on special shared slippers that are out in the hall, toilet slippers. Ida and I have a running joke that one of us is going to goof up and come back into our shoeless tatami dinner room wearing the toilet-slippers with two meters of toilet paper trailing from the heel.
August 11, 1993. Fever Powerful.
Outside our hotel in Kyoto is a pachinko parlor designed like a classic Greek temple, the archetypal house shape: a nearly cubical box with a single peaked roof. It is all glass, and the roof is broken into squares with colored lights that march across in patterns.
One of the pachinko games has a little video screen that shows a
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girl who eats a fruit and gets big and strong and then the words FEVER POWERFUL appear across her. The name of the machine is Fever Powerful. On the top of the machine is a picture of Fever Powerful on her back, arching her pelvis up, with her boobs sticking out, she looks like she's fucking.
August 13, 1993. Zen Rock Garden.
Back in Tokyo, we hit a high point, a visit to the most famous Zen rock garden of them all, Ryoanji, raked gravel with fifteen rocks grouped something like:
2 2
5 3
3
Ida saw an ant on the edge near us, then I saw a dragonfly landing on the other end, and then later, alone, I saw a skinny Japanese lizard crawl under the biggest rock of the 5 group. The world's most enlightened lizard. To put my head into the head of that lizard - this is a durable enlightenment trick that the rock garden has now given me, this is something that I am bringing home with me to mix into my visions, a life as the skinny lizard under the Zen garden rock. There seemed to be quite a space under the big rock, it looked like a lizard-sized cave, plenty of room in
there.
The rock garden was up against a wood building, an empty Zen temple with three empty rooms with tatami mats on the floor and faded ancient Zen landscape paintings on paper leaning no big deal against the walls. Around the corner from the rock garden was some moss with diverse mushrooms under trees, around the next corner was more moss and bamboo and a fountain trickling through a bamboo pipe into a round stone with a square hole in the middle. The four Japanese characters on the fountain said "I only learn to be contented." Audrey liked the fountain best, she bought a little metal copy of it. Getting up from looking at the rock garden for the third time I had a line of sight through the plain wood temple to see Audrey stepping barefoot down to the fountain and washing her hands, and then stepping up onto the
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old rubbed wood temple floor and moving her body in such a perfectly Zen and perfectly Audrey way, I saw the cuteness and wonder of her motion. "Yes, I'm stepping up from the fountain onto the smooth wood deck. This is me! Me the exclamation mark, me the same as ye."
The garden has been there for maybe six hundred years. People only started noticing it in the 1930s. The clay walls around the garden have a messy fucked-up pattern, with one piece of wall quite different from the others. The Japanese like asymmetry.
After the rock garden we had lunch in a Zen teahouse near the rock garden, two Zen monks there eating also, big Japanese guys with burr haircuts and gray robes; the lunch was a pot of warm water with slabs of tofu, and strainers to fish your slabs out to put in a little pot that you pour soy sauce into. Some veggies on the side: a few beans, a piece of eggplant, a pickled pepper. We sat on cushions on the tatami mat floor by a slid-open paper door, outside the door a little pondlet with miniature trees and big carp in the pond. One of the carp jumped halfway out of the water. "Did you see that?" I ask Ida. "Yes!" says Ida. "That right there happening was a haiku!" We all felt very happy and high.
August 15, 1993. The Jal Warning Film.
Back in Tokyo for a last day, in the morning through a hotel door I heard the sound of a woman's voice in sexual ecstasy. "Hai, hai, hai, hai!" In the breakfast room, the couples look like high school students. "Hai" means "Yes."
We make one last run to the Ginza. In the basement of the Tokyo department store, a plump girl leans over her soba noodle soup. A single noodle dangles from her lips, swaying as she sucks it in.
Everywhere there are the voices of the "Good Dolls," the breathless childlike voices of the Japanese advice women. The best Good Dolls run the elevators in person in the department stores. Their motions are a beautiful dance, with their white gloves they make the virtual moves of pulling the doors open. We're tired of the voices of the Good Dolls, even in our last bus to the airport to leave Japan there is a Good Doll voice. It's like in the movie Alien when Sigourney Weaver escapes into a lifeboat ship . . . and there's an alien in it
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with her. What if when I get my car at the airport back in SF there's a Good Doll voice in it?
On the plane back: the eager violence of the unfolding inflatable slide that pops out of the airplane in the instructional video JAL shows us. When we near the shores of Californee, JAL shows a short film about AIDS and a long film about drugs. Close shot on an apple. A big syringe injects narcotics into the apple. Close on a Japanese girl lying on her stomach on a towel at the beach. A hand moves into frame holding the apple. English translation of the voiceover: "They may ask you if you want to have fun or if you want to have a good time. They will not mention drugs. They will offer you something that looks harmless, but it is drugs."
When I got to my car at the airport it looked wonderful.
"I'm Rudy's," it said so I could hear it. "I'm Rudy's car. The old red Acura."
"You?" I said. "It's you? Thank you, my dear faithful hound. Thank you for having continued to exist. We have been in Asia for very long."
"Get in and drive me home," said the car. "And next week you and me are going to start commuting to work again."
Appeared in Transreal, WCS Books, 1991
and in Axcess, #8, Summer 1994.
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The Manual of Evasion
January 7, 1994. En Route to Portugal.
No clear idea what day of the week it is, I'm still in the holiday ''broken clock all gone" mode of vacation. Times like this is when it really pays off to be an academic. I don't have to go back to work for almost three more weeks.
I'm on my way to Portugal, to be filmed by some guy who got a grant from the city of Lisbon to make a movie about Lisbon. Edgar Pera. The negotiations were all with his producer, Catarina Santos. Edgar's read some of my books in Portuguese and decided to have me be in his movie, also the SF-and-conspiracy writer Robert Anton Wilson and the psychedelic prophet Terence McKenna. Edgar must be quite a character, judging from his taste in literature, but you never know with Europeans. Catarina wrote me to ask me my sizes for costumes. The movie may be fictional rather than the expected documentary, I don't know. She called again just before I left, and I asked her what the costumes were, and she didn't want to tell me. "It's better if it's a surprise." So the theory I've been promulgating to my friends and family is that I'm going to Portugal to be filmed dressed as a giant chicken scratching at the ground with my feet.
My dog Arf has been scratching the ground like crazy recently, I think it releases musk from glands by his dewlaps. I've been studying him in preparation for my role. If Edgar asks me to improvise, that's what I can do. The first thing I'll say will be, "Do you have a chicken costume I can wear?" My face showing inside the huge, open beak. Foghorn Leghorn. A wobbling featherduster wired to my padded fanny. Or, worse, the handle stuck up my naked butt. But, hey, don't laugh, they're paying me all expenses plus a nice fee.
January 8, 1994. Airport Hassles.
It's 29 hours later and I'm still in an airport. Newark was iced in, and my flight from Dulles was cancelled. I spent the night in the Dulles
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Hyatt in D.C., and I went back to Dulles pretty early in the morning today. Now I'm at JFK in New York.
I had interesting dreams last night, I was in this half-awake kind of state worrying about when to get up, and started dreaming quite lucidly, knowing I was dreaming, and dreamed endless variations on the hotel room. And sometimes something would come and grab me or attack me, and I realized this time that those things are also me, they are projected by me, everything in the dream is a projection of me, so I'd like grab the imp on my shoulder and squeeze and merge with him, and have a whirlpool kind of feeling. Very unusual. The fact that I watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on TV in bed just before sleep helped the dreams too, no doubt.
Here in N.Y., the tree branches are all covered with thick coats of ice. There's been an ice storm, which is why it took me 24 hours longer to get here. I have a boarding pass for TAP (Air Portugal); here's hoping it takes off in an hour like it's supposed to. Bad sign: it doesn't have a gate listed yet, and all the other planes do. My suitcase got away from me at Dulles yesterday, too, so I've been wearing these clothes for two days now, and slept in the shirt as well. Supposedly it will catch up with me or I with it in Lisbon. If I ever get there.
Okay, we are on the plane now. I have a window seat and the plane is completely full. This is going to be rough. Nobody on the plane seems to speak English at all. The loudspeaker is playing the Lettermen singing Christmas carols. A big fat stoic lady next to me in all black and with big purse and coat and shopping bags that she doesn't want to put in the overhead. Her face is covered with warts, warts on warts like a fractal. Her arm is sticking way into my space. It's a good thing they're paying me to do this.
January 9, 1994. Lisbon, Terence Mckenna.
As it turned out, the plane sat on the ground for 2 hours before taking off. While we were sitting there, Robert Anton Wilson got put on the plane, his connection had been late. I said hi to him; he looked pretty stressed, his face taut, red and masklike. Later he told me that
he's 62 and has high blood pressure. He also has post-polio syndrome, which makes him walk unsteadily.
When we got to Lisbon, it turned out that both our suitcases were