Sakura mid-bloom. A few days more to peak!

Because it is beautiful...along the Kanda River in the Nishiwaseda section of Tokyo, just outside my door.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To live in a world meant for other people

Image
To live in a world meant for other people     Here a bartender carves a block of ice into a near-perfect sphere with a sharp knife and his bare hand.  A geisha steps onto the elevator in the hotel, her hair brushed back with painstaking accuracy.  In the restaurant, food is prepared with care and served with even more care.  Ugly buildings and tangled wires overhead share space with small gardens and handmade signs and window displays and rows of idle bicycles.  Neon skeletons hang by day and become breathing beauties at nightfall.  Preschoolers line up like ducks in yellow uniforms on a train platform.  I hear one visitor refer to these children as the reason why “they are so militaristic.”  My introduction to Japan is a list of quips like this one from other westerners.  I hear them from strangers on the subway.  I hear them from my co-worker who has lived here for several years.  I hear them from the occasio...
Read more

My Books Reviewed at San Francisco Review of Books

Image
Syncopated Rhythm  "... The language is so appropriately raw when needed and so fragile in other passages ... Writing of this apparent simplicity is true craftsmanship and James carries this creative flow throughout the book ... James' gifts as a writer are extraordinary. This may be new work and if so it holds promise of an author who will likely rise in the same realm as Jonathan Saffron Foer et al." - San Francisco Review of Books Clifford and Claudia  "... [the author] can interplay gay characters with aplomb and make his story so universally relevant that the reader can simply sit back and enjoy the entertainment. And in his novel there is entertainment aplenty! ... His ability to create stories that are refreshingly unexpected places him in line with some of most established authors. Highly recommended." - San Francisco Review of Books The Story of Teddy and Eddie  "... James’ elegant style of writing inserts italicized poetic pass...
Read more

Living in the Chelsea Hotel

Image
The landmark Chelsea Hotel was built in the 1880s as one of the city's first private co-ops. In 1905, it re-opened as a hotel. Over the years, the hotel has been the home of numerous writers, musicians, artists, and actors, including Dee Dee Ramone, Bob Dylan, Virgil Thomson, Sam Shepard, Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur Miller, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Patti Smith. In the 1970s, a New York landmark himself, Stanley Bard took over the management of the hotel, and his son David joined him later on. In the autumn of 1978, punk rocker Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in Room 100, a room that has joined the other ghosts that make up the Chelsea. View from the Balcony, Room 325 The year is 1995 or 1996. I enter the Chelsea Hotel, push through the heavy glass doors. The light in the lobby adjusts to my eyes. Art runs floor to ceiling around the room. Obscure paintings. Little known artists. A s...
Read more