The mind

I submit myself to the power and magic of the mind - the sane and clear voyance! The world belongs to idealists and ideologists, all others are victims, sacrifices, followers, slaves or madmen. If I can not think on my own or behold my free will, however tiny and insignificant it is, then I will fall into the categories of victims, sacrifices, followers and slaves while remain painfully conscious. I chose not to be the above and I will never be.

Pola Eros by Nobuyoshi Araki

Araki once said: I tell them that “I free their souls by tying up their bodies.”
Some times I feel that I am reading the book of universal truth when I comtemplate the beautiful small photograph of his on my desk.

We are bound to be born, to be old, to be sick and to be dead. This state of physical being is what our bodies go through. But we have our free will to chose to enjoy it. Chosen happiness and pleasure in unavoidable suffering, this is what life is about - and with this, we are free and enternal.

http://www.vice.com/read/nobuyoshi-araki-118-v15n7

Before - Chapter One

I walked into the noodle shop where I have breakfast every morning. Something unusual  happened. The wife of the shop owner was not there! Usually, she would be sitting like a steamed red bean dumpling behind the cash machine, her eyes scrutinizing every customer, fearing that they would run away without payment. Her third eye behind the skull supervising her husband who works in the kitchen, fearing that he would flirt or run away with the pretty server from the country. But today, even the country girl is missing!

"What happened?" I asked. The boss made an angry and disappointing sign, serving my noodle himself.

"You are the only person who does not know this in Hangzhou! Wang Manliang died! Today is his funeral. His ordered his body to be cremated and the ash to be sent to Rongfa Farm to feed the chicken. The eggs of that farm have been pre-sold for the next 5 years."

Wan Manliang is the most famous person in Hangzhou. You don't see him on TV, read him in the papers or hear any official news about him. But his name is on every one's lips in each little restaurant, in secretive blogs, on both the police's surveillance and protection lists. This in itself is remarkable. Because people of Hangzhou are usually not easily impressed by anyone.

Hangzhou is a city that is blessed with everything and cursed because it has everything. It sits at the southern end of the Grand Canal through which the emperors shipped the most beautiful girls and the finest silk, rice, fish and tea to the North. Its picturesque mountains, lakes and gardens attract suicidal lovers and scholarly men.  A few hundred years ago, the Song Dynasty emperor, chased by the barbarians from the Mongolian plain, settled in Hangzhou. His desperate generals opened the dikes and dams holding back the waters of the Yellow River in order to decimate the oncoming Jurchen invaders. The emperor brought with him the harsh northern accent, useless officials, and hopeless romantics to this mild and soft city. The emperor thought in contempt of the person who had the stupid idea to dig a 1000 km canal to deal with the lengthy and costly logistics. He regretted that he only found this paradise on earth after losing half of the country. But isn't there an old saying "No pain, no gain"?

Appreciative of comfort, loving the decadence and proudly so are the people of Hangzhou. At best, the realization of the most ambitious dreams would bring you to Hangzhou. Why bother to become a bee when you are already in the honey hole? The people here spend their time touting tourists, eating refined food, drinking tea, gossiping and hating the Shanghainese because they are richer but frugal and refuse to be cheated.

The people of Hangzhou have seen very one that is famous: the most famous poet who happened to be its mayor; the most famous general got murdered by the most famous traitor; the most famous young revolutionaries died for the biggest truth or illusion; the most famous politicians and their mistresses (Mao had two villas built at the most exclusive spots around the lake); the most famous opera and movie stars; the most famous prostitute that has a higher-calling than each one of us; and even the most magical snake who falls in love with a man.  All of them left their traces with tombs, temples, villas, poems, caligraphy, songs, legends, slogans, rumors and confusions.  To say that there is information, culture and fame overkill is not overstated at all. People here are indifferent.

However, for some really wierd reasons, none of the famous people that left their names in Hangzhou was from Hangzhou. Sadly, Hangzhou, like a busy mid-wife, does not have her own proud son and daughter. This is the biggest concern of the major of Hangzhou! Unlike Shaoxing, though small and tucked away, people know Lu Xun who wrote those typical characters that symbolize that town. Take the beggar-hooligan character A-Q for example, all the places he went to in Lu Xun's novel have been developed into tourist spots, creating serious competition against Hangzhou. The convent where he tried to harass the young nuns was the most famous and they charge 50 RMB for the entrance fee; the restaurant where he begged became a national culinary chain and those boiled beans are sold in eye-catching packaging in every supermarket; the small crumbing temple where he slept became a place of worship where country women pray for having a son as their first born so that they don't pay a fine to give a second try; the big, beautifully carved bed of the county scholar's wife is the most sough after decorative furniture and culture symbol in high-end brothels in Shanghai.

It is high time for Hangzhou to have her own character.

Those Angels

Those angels, proud residents of Los Angeles
tell me what you think of this town,
this dry patch of earth of fruits and nuts?

This land of big cars for an environmentally friend people
The obsession of organic products by the "enhanced" humans
The country of dreams and disillusions
And all is so true and truthful, consistently.

And this little accidental spark in the dark sea of everything
upon the unpredictable roulette of hazards
is as natural and as wiered as the Japanese tsunami
hitting the shores of Venice beach.

Aren't we all linked, one way or another?
Go figure, or don't waste your time.

Doppelganger - Black Swan

Hi you!
Are you the shadow,
or I am the cast?

You behave opposite,
in an understanding way;
I am in shock
by the usual plot.

When I say good bye,
I welcome you back.
As we see each other,
we depart, far away.

The lights in Tokyo

Indifferent and nonchalant
Amazingly and disorderly cool
Regardless

Admire it, neglect it, disregard it
doesn't matter.
Nothing is lost in translation...

The dramatic art of Ignácz Trebitsch (Trebitsch Lincoln)

Born Jewish as Abraham Schwarz, aka Moses Pinkeles in Hungury. Studies dramatic arts and was in trouble with the police and fled the country. He converted to Christianity in London and became a missionary in Canada. He turned Bristish as Tribich Lincoln and became a member of the parliament.
In the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War he was involved in a variety of failed commercial endeavours, living for a time in Bucharest, hoping to make money in the oil industry. Back in London with no money, he offered his services to the British government as a spy. When he was rejected he went to Holland and made contact with the Germans, who employed him as a double-agent.
Returning to England, he narrowly escaped arrest, leaving for the United States in 1915, where he made contact with the German military attaché, Franz von Papen. Papen was instructed by Berlin to have nothing to do with him, whereupon Trebitsch sold his "story" to the New York World Magazine, which published under the banner headline Revelation of I. T. T. Lincoln, Former Member of Parliament Who Became a Spy.
The British government, anxious to avoid any embarrassment, employed the Pinkerton agency to track down the renegade. He was returned to England – not on a charge of espionage, which was not covered by the Anglo-American extradition treaty, but of fraud, far more apt in the circumstances. He served three years in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, and was released and deported in 1919.
A penniless refugee, Trebitsch-Lincoln worked his way bit by bit into the extreme right-wing and militarist fringe in Weimar Germany, making the acquaintance of Wolfgang Kapp and Erich Ludendorff among others. In 1920, following the Kapp Putsch, he was appointed press censor to the new government. In this capacity he met Adolf Hitler, who flew in from Munich the day before the Putsch collapsed.

With the fall of Kapp, Trebitsch fled south from Munich to Vienna to Budapest, intriguing all along the way, linking up with whole variety of fringe political factions, such as a loose alliance of monarchists and reactionaries from all over Europe known as the White International. Entrusted with the organisation's archives, he promptly sold the information to the secret services of various governments. Tried and acquitted on a charge of high treason in Austria, he was deported yet again, ending up in China, where he took up employment under three different warlords including Wu Peifu.
Supposedly after a mystic experience in the late 1920s, Trebitsch converted to Buddhism, becoming a monk. In 1931 he rose to the rank of abbot, establishing his own monastery in Shanghai. All initiates were required to hand over their possessions to Abbot Chao Kung,(Ch. 照空 Zhao Kong) as he now called himself, who also spent his time seducing nuns.

In 1937 he transferred his loyalties yet again, this time to the Japanese, producing anti-British propaganda on their behalf. Chinese sources say the opposite, that he wrote numerous letters and articles for the European press condemning Japanese imperial aggression in China. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he also made contact with the Nazis, offering to broadcast for them and to raise up all the Buddhists of the East against any remaining British influence in the area. The chief of the Gestapo in the Far East, SS Colonel Joseph Mesinger, urged that this scheme receive serious attention. It was even seriously suggested that Trebitsch be allowed to accompany German agents to Tibet to implement the scheme.
Heinrich Himmler was enthusiastic, as was Rudolf Hess, but it all came to nothing after the latter flew to Scotland in May 1941. After this, Hitler put an end to all crackpot, pseudo-mystical schemes. Even so, Trebitsch continued his work for the German and Japanese security services in Shanghai until his death in 1943.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/08/books/on-the-trail-of-trebitsch-lincoln-triple-agent.html?sec=&pagewanted=all