Kyoto Sakura

Well, it's that time of the year again...Cherry blossom time! This was the first time I saw the blossoms in Kyoto. The whole area around my apartment and my work exploded into a pale pink canopy above the street. There are whole neighbourhoods where it seems the only tree ever planted is the beloved Cherry. This year, they were whiter than I remember.

I've seen them about 5 times now, but they are still just as magical as the first time I saw them. Wow! Taking sakura pictures is addictive!


This is Kiyamachi street. It runs along a little canal and is one of the most beautiful places to see the blossoms. I think it has such a stunning effect because the trees here are right in the middle of the city.

I like the street sign here that says: "Hey son, let's run into
the middle of the road to check out the sakura!"

People tend to have picnics under the trees during spring. This is Maruyama Park and there were so many people that it was hard to find a place to sit down. The whole area was filled with drunken businessmen, tourists, and college kids skipping school. Wouldn't you?

There were a tonne of stalls selling food. This takoyaki-ya san hung his lantern in the branches. It was a good way to get free advertising.


Many women wore kimonos. This was also common in Kanazawa. But the designs in Kyoto take the cake!
After eating some delicious Japanese junk food in the park, I left to go to Nijo Palace to see nighttime blossoms. Nijo Palace is one of Kyoto's many world heritage sites. The illumination was incredible. You can't capture the magic on film...or digitally, even...But I tried! Here are my two best attempts.

The people are so small beneath the ancient trees. It's hard to imagine Japan's first Shogun also walked in the same garden so many years ago.

Everyone had their cameras out. It was irresistible.

The shrine of good humour!

yes, his junk is hanging out

It's a little know shrine in Kyoto, which shares real estate with some kind of noodle shop, but the Shrine of Good Humour is a popular place to visit for pranksters, funnymen, and others seeking the holy grail of gags, puns, and punchlines. The pantsing god, seems like a 'punny' acronym for the panting dog, but he is, in fact, the mascot for the shrine.


The shrine itself is actually comedy size as well. Shrines usually have large torii gates at the entrance, but this shrine has tiny wee things leading to a miniature matchbox building inside a little niche in the corner of the shop. It is a real shrine and people pray for a good sense of humour, and then make a joke.

I tried making a twitter joke: 100 characters of less. "Two men walk into a bar...Ouch."

As in all religions, if your prayers are answered (in this case with a hillarious punchline, a la business man in a suit slipping on a banana, or a cat fail), then you bring a votive plaque to show your appreciation.

I couldn't read them, but one lady is watering her garden with breast-milk

The shrine in renowned for turning greasy dullards into comedic supermen. And this can be seen in the large amount of dirty jokes painted on the votives.

If you have a good twitter joke, please leave it in the comments. Mine was kinda lame, but I was under pressure. There was a big nerd behind me that wanted a transformance into a Charlie Sheen-type winning machine!

98% Grey Book Launch

Well, my book is now available at www.98percentgrey.com as well as on Amazon.com!

The launch was a great success with about 50 people showing up.



Here's the excerpt I read:

"A violent act leaves deep tracks, like knuckle-prints on a sandbag. Above her closet, she wrote “This too shall pass…” She repainted her room in a pastel green, a pale jade. Pantone™ 324. She then employed a gold marker once used in a homegrown bookbinding operation to scrawl enormous French curves and daffodils along the edges of the green field. The room changed to a meadow, to an Art Nouveau altier en plein air. And above the door “This too shall pass” in her own variation of a hand drawn Garamond.

She had owned the house for about 2 years now. It was actually sold through a police auction. The basement area, where Marci has domesticated, was once the crime-den of an ecstasy production ring. It was the laboratory—what the chemists-cum-gangsters called ‘the Pit’. It was an old house in the Annex area of the city, in a neighbourhood of beautiful gardens and ancient, wooden Victorian houses. There was no way one would assume a pharma-criminal ring was producing MDMA in a basement next to old widows and city-council members. Marci’s old associate first discovered the massive auction. It included all kinds of science apparatus, furniture (in particular a mahogany desk circa 1816 which he had his eyes on), as well as holdings all over the city. Marci acquired the house on Euclid Street mainly because the inheritance from her mother allowed her a large wager. It was a difficult time for her and, I suppose, she needed something concrete to pour her feelings of loss into. The house had been her saviour.

A week after she bought it, she moved in with a weapon-rack of brushes, rollers, paints, and palet-knives. The building was a chemically altered, deteriorating zombie, and Marci had to operate. She started at the heart, the lab in the basement, and worked her way up. Initially, she painted what would be her future room, a deep red. It was crimson, a velour close to Pantone™ 202 or 222. She then decided it was not deep enough. It needed more. A profundity which matched her sadness: a deep, pure blue.

She found the muffle-furnace on her second day of living in the house. It was hidden behind a stack of drywall sheets. Marci saw this as a sign. She would build the blue from scratch. It became her process, her catharsis.

She decided to make ultramarine, the deepest and most permanent of the blues, and easy enough to make from scratch.

(Ingredients needed: Clay,
Fine, soft white sand
Charcoal,
Sulphur.)

The baking started on the 6th evening. She watched the white clay heat, turn green, then red. It was an alchemical process that burned inside the oven and inside her heart. She watched it shift, transform and magically settle on a pure blue. The colour of the sky and water, of all things natural and emotional combined, heated into a brick the size of a deck of cards.

On the 7th day, everything was silent. The oven had finished and when Marci, in a spotless white apron complete with long gloves and a doctor’s mask, tried to look inside it, she could not see through the window. There was an opaque blue blocking her view. When she opened the furnace, a fine blue mist escaped and filled the room. Momentarily, Marci was enveloped in the blue of her mother’s death. Staring through the cloud of mourning was like looking into the evening sky, beyond which she could barely make out the fuzzy outline of the muffle-furnace with its own deep cavity on the other side.

And when the dust settled, she was covered in a blue film and she found the ultramarine sitting in a blue-coloured vault, where malign chemicals were once baked into designer drugs.

She removed it with a pair of tongs, careful beyond necessity, as if she was birthing it, the blue, her twin from the feeling of loss itself. After placing it onto the table, she crushed a corner of the brick and spontaneously started weeping, as if she had committed some crime against this brick she had just given life. You see, Marci had grown incredibly attached to the clay during the making of this colour. It had transformed inside the oven and grown inside her mind overnight, becoming a living essence. And the moment she broke the corner of the small, powdery rectangle, she felt she had hurt it, caused it to suffer. Immediately, manically even, she mixed the powdered blue with oil and dripping tears, made it transparent: a thin blue glaze. She rubbed this nurtured blue all over her crimson wall, daubing it with tissues, covering the red in the depth of the heavens. It deepened, opened up space and felt somehow alive. She had breathed life into the walls, made it a womb. When it dried, she knew this would be her bedroom. The terminus of her emotional system, where she could sleep, live, heal."