Time is Round

My friend Steve Kang and I, in college, used to sit around and talk about how time was not linear but parabolic. I can't remember what kind of proof we came up with in our Jack Daniels stupor, but it's an idea I've always thought about. When I was working on pictures of the drowned, the actors were talking about what they feared the most about the idea of death. I remember what Dario said, his fear was that death was a state of being perpetually stuck in whatever the final moment of your life was. So in other words, no matter how happy and wonderful a life you had, if the very moment of your death is of utter terror, that you would carry that state into the next place. This just made me think more about the linearity of time as a false perception... I'm just going to leave this thought at that because I don't know if I can really go any farther with it and be understood...

This morning I had a final meeting with Okada, his Company Manager Akane Nakamura, and their frequent Stage Manager So Ozaki. Under discussion were the subtitles for their upcoming U.S. tours, which I am preparing. They had toured to Singapore with my first draft translation, but found that the colloquialisms native to the U.S. were not comprehensible to audiences in Singapore, and hence the discussion about neutralizing the English -- or really, whether that would be a possible task, considering the super-colloquial tone of Okada's original language. Also, because in the Japanese the subject of a sentence is assumed and because Okada uses that to perpetuate an ambiguity (and ambivalence) in his mono/dialogues, how to handle this in translation into languages which cannot function without a specified subject? All fascinating linguistic issues -- to me anyway. Here is So -- he's from Kyoto.

And Akane with Okada. So cute.

After the meeting, So was actually just upstairs in the Opera City building working on an installation for an exhibition opening tomorrow. It was pretty awesome, actually, a dozen or so artists of different nationalities. There was an American artist with a video installation. Check out this photo.

That's me.
A few moments later...

The guy in the red is not a reaｌ person. Basically you walk into this room that have four little window monitors that are showing a live camera feed taken from the opposite side of the room. So if you are looking into one of these windows, you will be looking at yourself from behind, e.g. your butt. But then these other people show up in the frame, making noise and all, but if you turn to look back at them, in the room, you see that they are not there at all. It's like seeing a ghost. Eerie.

On Facebook, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine from high school, someone I hadn`t seen essentially since we graduated, over 15 years ago. And he lives in Tokyo. We decided to met up today -- it was lovely to catch up with Binzee.

He also was diagnosed 6 months ago with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was in between chemo sessions. I actually went to school with Binzee for seven years or something -- he was a class above me so we weren't super close. I just remember him as one of the most wholesome students -- student body president, tennis and soccer player, smart, handsome, liked by everyone. He has maintained an incredible optimism and strength through the last several months, I think. A beautiful & inspiring thing. His son Tyga is just over one year old.