All-You-Can-Drink!

Summer comes to Japan.

In Kyoto, that means the rooftop Beer Garden nomihodai (all you can drink) and tabehodai (all you can eat) parties. Get sloshed on draft beer of varying quality and kill time between refills chomping on Japanese and Western foods. The quality of the food as well varies with price, as does location and view, but all are variations on a theme: get outside up high and drink.

Kampai!

The signage for these things is really unavoidable.  All summer long.

this one hanging inside the train says "Asahi Rooftop Sky Baikingu (Viking)"　(see language note right)

Time for a One-Point Japanese lesson that sheds much wattage on the continuing linguistic evolution of this country.

TOWER is because the location is at the Keihan Kyoto Tower Hotel.

BEER = 'nuff said.

VIKING...here is where it gets interesting, means an all-you-can-eat buffet meal, and comes about (which I love) by being the only Swedish word/concept known here outside of VOLVO, and is used to represent the notion of smorgasbord, the Swedish origin of the self-serve buffet. 

 Understanding this trainwreck of thought will help the foreigner hack his way through the jungle of Japanese English (Nihonglish, Nihongo-Eigo, Engrish, call it what you will).

she didn't drink this one, but sure looks suspicious. this empty chu-hi can was clanking around the floor on my 7:27 (a.m.) express to osaka.

a couple of my people here for the opening of tourist season. overheard them asking the JR guy for some directions...American, with a tinge of below the Mason-Dixon.

I try to practice non-judgment, and I appreciate & commend the Diet Coke, but really, how can you just let yourself get that far gone.

there was a high school couple balling each other under the pergola, a homeless guy sleeping near his mound of detritus, and me cruising through on my bicycle drinking a beer...just about everything you'd want from a small town park late on a Wednesday night.

from another student, another origami crane of Good Luck that I will never be able to throw away.

(but by much)

a vintage Schwinn StingRay chopper parked outside either the convenience store or LAB Tribe dance music center.

we like how the girlfriend pegs on the back cant the girl forward so that her front presses hard into your back.  sweet.

(^ . ^)

Kind of sad, all these old books stacked up and dumped out in front of the antiquarian bookseller for a bit of veritas. Like who is ever going to pull out one of those bottom ones and open it for the light it has to shed?...

Exactly. Me neither.

--Charles Bukowski

something I couldn't shouldn't oughtn't wouldn't do.

Lived on the Inside.

Seen from the Outside.™

some foreigners paying the billz as screwball models. for a potent Korean drink, JINRO, the absinthe of Asia, now available in cans mixed with soda water.

wherever alcohol is sold. which is everywhere.

I just said something really witty & clever, in Japanese, to these college chicks.

(the one in the black didn't get it. she must only be at a technical college.)

I actually met Bukowski once, in Los Angeles.  It was at this alternative video space in W Hollywood where I was having an exhibition of paintings I'd done of women based on magazine images.  On the night of my opening he was there to introduce a screening of clips of a documentary Barbet Schroeder had made, connected to his making of Barfly.

Per reputation, he was sloshed, and before his words, he looked around at my paintings on the wall and said something about "a good eye for whores" to me.  My mother was in attendance & shocked.  She had her opinions about him clutching a Bud tall boy as he stumbled to the podium, then lean on it as he rambled on a bit, drop a few jewels from his mouth which I don't remember, then said "I won't be sticking around to watch. I'm going to get shitfaced." And out he tumbled & I guess he did.

Soon the moms would get to be mortified watching this man of letters kick and beat his wife Linda on the couch, in a famous scene from the doc.

Not long after this night, at a related art event, I met a youngish girl who said her parents were friends of Bukowski, and that he came over for dinner & drinking a lot, and as she got older & riper they began saying things to her like: "Once he starts drinking I don't want you getting too close to Uncle Hank tonight.  And no more sitting on his lap."

But a beautiful writer...

(if you don't know what it is...good for you)

a kind of gnarly group splatter-porn in which a batch of weak, insecure men feel powerful & extraordinary by coating a tiny bound woman or two with pumps of testicle tofu.

the word I was looking for was bukatsu, the quasi-mandatory group and club activities that devour so much student time & energy.

bling-bling!  

and it's all FREE to look at for the whole fckng ride!

sharing a smoke they call loneliness, but it's better than smoking alone...

a couple of strangers after work, waiting for their trains, daydreaming about being somewhere else.

beautiful free photo cards for occasions:

(not bleakfast)

feed 'em...don't fatten 'em

should have seen it coming

Last night my final remaining grandparent died in her sleep.
The funeral is back in America and I will not be at it...I don't know if this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do.

But I know I'm not going to chase Death across the oceans; I'm staying right here surrounded by Life.

Rest peaceful, E.

pray

sit here and smoke while you wait to die.

planted rice paddy maze, optical illusion & potential migraine headache. this season presents wonderful arrays of earthwork art that, eventually, you can eat.

Kyoto: the nightly pairing off into what's known as kamogawa couples.

fellow readers: if you like this site please spread the word like human manure over an Edo Period rice field.  thanks.

posting a link to this site also much appreciated and good karma for you. 

another hotel roof, another couple dozen brews...

the writing in katakana reads bee-ah gah-den = beer garden = good times baby!

good night  oyasuminasai...