I Have Friends Who Go [tokyo] Frequently

When Did It Become Necessary To Explain What's So Cool About Japan? Everyone Was Quite Obsessed With It 15 Years Ago. I Suppose It's The Only Asian Country That Developed An Imaginary Entree To Me. That's Why I Go Back.

One Of The Liberating Effects Of Science Fiction When I Was A Teenager Was Precisely Its Ability To Tune Me Into All Sorts Of Strange Data And Make Me Realize That I Wasn’t As Totally Isolated In Perceiving The World As Being Monstrous And Crazy

When I Was First Writing About Japan, It Was At The Peak Of The Bubble. Bubble Popped, But They Kept On Going. Japanese Street Style Feeds American Iconics Back Into America In Somewhat The Way English Rock Once Fed American Blues Back Into America.

I Probably Had Something To Do With Being Southern. For Some Reason, Over The Last Few Years I've Been Much More Conscious Of That. It's Probably Because My Friend Jack Womack Has A Thesis That He And I Write The Way We Do Because We're Southern And We Experienced The Very Tail End Of The Premeditated South.

When I Come To A New City Is I Combine: I Say, Well, It's Like Barcelona And Edinburgh, Though I Can't Imagine What That Would Be. But Toronto, The Last Few Times I've Been Here, What Always Comes Up Is Chicago And West Berlin. It's A Big, Sprawling City Beside A Lake, Of A Certain Age And A Certain Architectural Complexity. But The High-end Retail Core Looks More Like West Germany Than The Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street Is Like K-damm. There's An Excess Of Surface Marble And Bronze: It's Germanic And As Pretentious As Pretentious Can Be.