The Karaoke sucks inside South Korea. The flesh did not prearrange. From here karaoke box system is break and “as the song box calls.” As for karaoke, the place where the girl — with you the lower part combines. And you are the money, which is enormous. It blows in the place. This night — my first Korean karaoke experiences. Went to the song box. Unlike the DMV- environment which goes on inside Japan at the enterprise 10001. Visible one pair, from after attending also. On the screen spreads out the seashore, burnt inside Bikini, surrounding cityscapes. Also it gets the girl.
The environment inside is a training in cut-up pit against the possibility of the Korean army. The white machine guns which eye the environment. It mixes in inside and one hundred color uniforms. The high school student, who burnt, went mad on the mic, I thought. But, that time stock exchange reports, and commercials for Samsung, and the CDMA. Advertising is converted into political exchange. The schedule of one Korean television station, which operates inside, was legitimate. I listened for the fact of the thing.
With each song possibility allocated inside Korea, all song boxes are thin. It is like this — the Korean song box lacks divination. A grudge against Japan. Inside the Japanese karaoke box, the song book comforts. It goes round inside the small British profile that is most weird. It sees. The dark initial cry of distress lieutenant fell inside.
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Karaoke sucks in South Korea. No pun intended. The karaoke box system here is simply called “singing boxes,” and the places that are called karaoke are the joints where girls sit down with you, and you blow huge money.
I went to the singing box tonight — my first Korean karaoke experience. In Japan, background visuals show couples meeting after attending to business at the DMV. Or, you get beach shots, ambient cityscapes, or girls in bikinis on the screen. Tonight, the background was cut-up footage of the Korean military in training, with white machine guns and white uniforms, blending in with the snowy background. Bizarre, I thought, as a room full of junior high school students went crazy on the mic. But, then the footage switched to stock market reports, and political exchanges behind closed doors, and advertisements for Samsung, CDMA, and some sports car. At some point, I clued in that they were just running regular Korean television.
I’ve heard in Korea that every song is assigned a number, and that song goes by that number in all the singing boxes in Korea. So, basically, Korean singing boxes lack the pleasant surprises of Japan. In Japanese karaoke boxes, the weirdest things turn up in the small English section of the song book. For example, one karaoke box in Tokyo featured 3 obscure Primal Scream tracks, while another had Bjork listed.

New Years Eve. In the backseat of a taxi through the Korean countryside, and then past stacks of identical apartment buildings in the wasteland of the night. Taxi pulls up. Get out. There’s a big gate, and a sign that reads “America Town.” Therein some kind of insanity lies in waiting. My heart’s beating double.
We walk into a bar. The most slamming, rolling, swinging hip-hop track is ripping out of the speakers. There’s GIs in full garb, guns and all. A girl dancing in a bikini on the stage. Other girls, a mix of Russians and Southeast Asians sitting around the tables. This is utterly unexpected for this group of civilian English teachers I’m with, male and female. There’s a bunch of old Korean ladies working the bar. One of them comes up behind me, stroking my hair. I’m totally bewildered. Every song, a new girl in a bikini takes to the stage. The hip-hop’s just getting darker. This venomous Tupac track in his Makaveli guise, “Fuck Mobb Deep, Fuck Bad Boy,” he’s spitting out of the speakers.
The next place. Same thing going on. Girls dancing in bikinis on the stage. American military, this time in civilian garb, consorting with the exotic mix of girls. I meet a few friendly guys from Puerto Rico in the air force. The guy explains it to me, the girls are prostitutes brought in for the soldiers, they’re checked out once a week. I ask the guy if this is typical for base situations, and he said it was. I asked him how he liked being in the military, and he said he just wanted to be home, but there was no work there. He said that none of the Americans want to be there. Which is funny, cause I don’t think any Koreans want the Americans there, either. So, why don’t they get out of here?
I’m an ocean away from America, but its military is inescapable.
I was just in Okinawa, which a lot of people either connect with Karate Kid II or its American military bases or with standard Japan. 90% of all US military operations in Japan are located in Okinawa, despite the fact that Okinawa represents less than 1% of the Japanese population.
After the second world war, the United States retained control of Okinawa, up until 1972. I bought a picture book, which shows Okinawa’s main island at the time of reversion to Japan. It’s interesting to see this alternate reality version of America.
In 2000, the main street of Naha, Okinawa’s biggest city, looks to me like what America might look like if Japan had won the war — the street looks American, but all the signs and people are Japanese.
Anyway, Okinawa’s part of Japan now, but the bases are still there. And where there aren’t bases, the main island is runover by tourist buses and resorts. American soldiers (at least some of them) behave atrociously and worse. In Naha, there’s even bars that won’t allow any foreigners, unless accompanied by Japanese people.
I’m reading a book called Island of the Colourblind, which hops across the islands of Micronesia. Some seriously toxic islands out there, and elsewhere some still unaffected, tremendously beautiful islands. The American presence is dotted through out. The military on Johnson island. And then there’s Guam, which is an American territory.
They’ve got to get out of these places.

Christmas Eve was my first time in Seoul. As in Korea. The dance dance revolution craze is going strong.
The snow started falling, and out the window of the bus, the West gate to Seoul’s old city centre looked so beautiful. We got off the bus, and walked along this long strip — people spilling out into the streets, despite the chilling weather and the late hour. There’s so much more life here than Tokyo.
Closer to the East gate, Dongdaemun, we ended up at 3:00 in the morning at Doosan Tower. The first 8 floors of the building are retail space. It felt more like a big wholesale centre than a shopping mall. Everyone was dressed so beautifully.
We wandered into a music store. I wondered if the new Wu-Tang Clan album might be out, but I didn’t see it. A cool looking cover caught my eye, and the words read In The Mood For Love, and then I remembered that’s the name of the new Wong Kar-Wai movie. For a moment, I hesitated to buy it. I felt fearful that it might inspire in me a new desire that I might not be able to satisfy. How could I think of listening to Nat King Cole, while accepting being alone?
With the new CD in my pocket, we continued walking around – the salespeople were sleeping, eating noodles, or talking on cell phones. I wanted to interact in this world, not to be the eternal outsider that comes with the skin I’m in. I want to be doing retail at 4 in the morning, feeling so tired and depressed, cause perhaps you’ll come one day to my stand, and the walls that separate our worlds will crumble.
There were signs in Russian, as well as Korean, and the only foreigners I saw were two beautiful looking Russian women (actually, I don’t understand Russian, so they could have been speaking a different language). I caught the glances of passer-by — and it later occurred to me, that they probably thought I was Russian, because of my long black jacket and white furry hat. I fancied that, cause I don’t think anyone’s ever thought of me as Russian before, other than the Vietnamese lady who mysteriously sat down me beside me in a Naha, Okinawa McDonalds, because she wanted to practice her Russian, and then proceeded to cold-shoulder me, when I told her that I wasn’t in fact Russian. Later at night, I looked at the majestic, classical architecture of Seoul Station, and in the cold blue light of a Winter night, from the back seat of the taxi cab, I imagined I was in Moscow. It helped that in the front seat, a girl was wearing a coat with a fur collar. This girl, I didn’t become acquainted with — she talked on a cellular phone. We were only ever that close, because in Seoul you can hire a taxi, and the driver still stops and picks up more people. To ride with strangers …
Three days later, in the mountains, 3 hours South of Seoul, I took In The Mood For Love out of its CD wrapper and played it, while I looked at pictures from my roommate’s trip to Thailand and Cambodia, and he told me about Angkor Wat. The next day, I noticed that about 12 movie-still-postcards came with the CD, and I showed them to my friend. He said, about one of the postcards, “That looks a lot like Angkor Wat.” And then I read the CD liner notes, and sure enough the finale of In The Mood For Love takes the viewer to Angkor Wat, one of the 7 wonders of the world. A strange conjunction.
Anyway, I know the movie ends at Angkor Wat. I know the soundtrack has 3 Nat King Cole songs. And I know what the characters look like. I plan on playing the soundtrack, and building my own life around it. I won’t watch the movie for years. And by then I wonder how much my life will be like a Wong Kar-Wai movie?

People are known to break their sleep at 3, and then go to New York New York. There’s no place where the promise is stronger. You sit there, drunk off your face, and every night you’re guaranteed to be chatting with some beautiful girl. And you get drunker and drunker, and you can barely see, and this beautiful girl has gone somewhere.
When I first stepped in the doors, I heard “Johnny B Goode,” and an hour later I heard it again, and then again the next time I returned. And so I began to make some enquiries, and it turned out they’d been playing the same CD on repeat for 6 years. It’s such an awkward, incongruent mix, “California Dreamin’,” “Walk On By,” “Tennessee Waltz,” “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and the one where the words go, “Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain, Telling me…,” and another song about “writing love letters in the sand.” I wondered if the CD continued even when the bar is closed. While later traveling on the unpopulated back side of Ishigaki island, in a cafe on the cliffs high above the ocean, I was sitting, eating curry chicken, at some cafe in the middle of nowhere, on the cliffs above the ocean, and I heard the same CD playing. By the justification that a one-hour Japanese lesson in Tokyo would have cost me about 4 beers, I spent night after night in New York New York drinking beer and speaking Japanese to the bartenders and regular customers. And some nights, I stayed too late, and 3 AM approached, and what else could I do but stay, and wait for the girls to come.
Once, I found myself in the empty bar at 4 in the morning. I wrote the short poem:
Time doesn’t change,
And the seasons stay the same,
But the girls that come,
Might come only once.

In Japan’s weakest economic prefecture, Miyako’s economy is said to be the poorest of the Okinawan islands big enough to be counted. It’s the best of the worst, the worst of the best — the greatest paradise east of Eden. Drunks sleeping on the streets. The smell of piss wafting upwards from the gutter. Clothing stores remind me of K-Mart from 20 years ago. And all around this island is the most beautiful ocean you could imagine. Shades of blue, you never knew there were so many. The economy seems to break down into a maximum of four or five sectors — construction, alcohol, rental equipment (cars, bicycles, diving goods), sugarcane, and Awamori (the island alcohol). This island, Miyako, has three smaller islands off its coast — huge, long bridges connect the islands — a car travels across a bridge once every 20 minutes. Why they build a bridge to islands with no people, and scarcely any economy no one can guess.
The reason there’s so many bars, I guess, is because the island has this mad drinking tradition. It’s called the “o-tori.” They have a kind of alcohol here called Awamori — it’s made by distilling a kind of Thailand rice — percentages range from the watery 10% to the strongman’s 60%. According to the custom, when someone calls an o-tori, he fills a small glass up, then makes a speech, downs the glass, and then fills the glass for everyone around the table, one by one. If the glass moves to the right, it’s said to be good for the fisherman. If the glass moves to the left, it’s good for the farmer. Once the glass goes around, the initial speaker makes another speech. Then, the glass moves to the next person. The next person, then, does a speech, and the pattern is repeated. But routinely, there’s 5 or 6 rounds — I mean, you get to make 5 or 6 speeches — so if there’s six people drinking, you hear 30 speeches. It’s like a shots session that lasts for several hours. All kinds of heart-to-heart communication opens up. An o-tori can be called at any time. And once it’s called, that’s it, game over, you’re going to get messed up, and every night that’s what happens. Because of this drinking tradition, I guess the children have no future.
Anyway, loads of venues are needed to accomodate this samurai-style drinking. So, there’s loads of what they call “snack-bars,” in which young ladies pour the drinks and light the cigarettes. But, of course, these young ladies aren’t local girls, cause this place is too small — they’d too easily wind up chatting up their father’s friends or old school teachers. So it is that hostesses can’t operate in their own locality. So, loads of girls are imported from other parts of Japan. They come down here, work the bars at night, and go scuba diving by day. The snack bars all close at 3 in the morning.
And then New York New York is the place to go.

I’d never considered it would be like to swim through a cloud, but now I know.
They say that the earth’s a water planet. Imagine if it really was, if the ocean had no floor, and sunlight could enter from one side, and exit from the other side. I dream of a transparent globe, a liquid globe, with islands floating like boats on the surface.
This beach is perfect. But is it natural? It’s the purest, whitest beach I:ve ever seen. But upon close inspection, it’s composed of so many multi-colored fragments — a mixture of coral fragements, broken sea shells, and star sand — colors are yellow, red, pink, purple, and orange. And so I wonder why it is that the whole appears to be white?
The water directly in front of me is clear. Eight feet ahead, it’s light blue, and beyond way out there, it’s deep blue. And, across the horizon, the afternoon sun, low in the sky, makes a glistening, gold triangle that reaches me at its apex — but wherever I move, I remain at its apex.
Under the surface, it’s almost whiteout. I swim in the water and it’s scary, because everything is so so white. I lose depth perception. I can see so clearly that I begin to wonder if I’m seeing nothing. I start seeing things that aren’t there, ghostly white shapes. Beyond the surface, I know there’s no one on the beach, no people around, and just beyond where I am two fisherman have died from shark attacks in recent years. But now there’s no fishermen out, so I’m spooked, cause I’m the only food in the area. And then I surface, I look down into the water, and out of the white-blue a pure white fish, the length of a small foot, swims around me.
If there’s a God, I wonder if God designed physical laws in order to create the universe, or if because of physics this is the only universe that God was able to create.
It’s interesting to me how dreams abandon the laws of physics. The imagination works without constraints. Perhaps, physics is a weakness of the heart, a lie that we impose on our imagination (or our imaginations).
What if these colorful fragments of shells around my feet were plastic. That would change everything.
It’s possible to imagine some animals in a mechanical version (and some people, too). But the way a fish moves, how could we duplicate that?
The books I’ve read in the last year mix together, become as one in my mind, their authors closer than they would ever know. It’s a fine thing to read just a little, and let it linger. You need to let things sink in.
This Borges sentence never leaves my mind. If I only wrote it. “Time passed like the sands, and in the darkness, centuries old, love flowed.” But funny thing is, Borges writes in Spanish, so who wrote these words? Does the original have such perfect cadence? Does it roll around in the mind so nicely?
Design the world.
Design a world.
Worlds within worlds.
Worlds within words.
Words within words.
Words within worlds.
Worlds without words.
Worlds without within and without.