Snapshots and ruminations about art, reverb, creative processes, and finding a little faith in the twenty-first century. Currently broadcasting from Taipei.
Sweet potato balls, socks, salted grapes, electric fans, live shrimp, umbrellas, anything you can imagine doing to a squid, mobile phones, beef noodle soup, blue jeans, games of mahjong played for stuffed animals, pepper steak, an archery range with real arrows, quail eggs, the spoiled gasoline reek of stinky tofu, corn on the cob, wedding rings, live gerbils, flashlights, chili oil, a crepe filled with ice cream and peanut dust and cilantro, carrot smoothies, cookware, a lady screaming cheesecake! at my very white self, pajamas, dumplings filled with every flavor of flesh, toy robots, sweet sausages wrapped in sticky rice, live goldfish, strawberries, luggage, anything that can become a kebab, toolboxes, scallion pancakes, flip flops, a sweaty man auctioning remote-controlled cars, fresh meat, blouses, turnip cakes, hairdryers, eclairs, intestines, and hats.
The idea of an animatronic version of eighteen levels of hell sounds funny, and for the first five or six levels, it is. But repetition nudges comedy into absurdity, which can quickly descend into horror.
Like the sinners it torments, Madou Daitian Temple is trapped in time. Built in 1979 for the present-day equivalent of $12 million, its sun-bleached paint, shuttered rooms, and lonely vending machines evoke the same tender melancholy I felt while visiting Coney Island on a February afternoon or Circus Circus on a Tuesday morning. The memory of families with a picnic basket, wowed by the crowds. The ghosts of honeymooners spending more than they should. Madou’s eighteen levels of hell occupy a similar zone of dark curiosity, its heyday etched in the face of the ancient woman who collects $1.20 for admission to hell and another $1.20 to visit heaven.
Each level of hell is ruled by a king who governs demons that specialize in tongue ripping, boulder crushing, disembowelment, and gouging. Although they could do with some fresh oil in their gears, their squeaky joints and janky gestures pay dividends in hell. (Anyone with a memory of Chuck E. Cheese knows animatronics are high-octane nightmare fuel.) But the eeriest quality belongs to the contemporary clothes of the sinners. Blue jeans and khakis conjure a local fever dream rather than a remote otherworld.
Video seemed like the best way to capture the relentlessness of this hell, so I made this inventory.
And here's a list of the sins and punishments:
Sinners are put on trial and sentenced to different levels of hell to be punished.
Corrupt officials who abuse their power and torment the people shall be decapitated by the “tiger head” torture.
Those who bully the defenseless are ground into a bloody pulp.
Rapists and women who kill their husbands are tied to a large metal cylinder with a fire lit at its base.
Those who are after their own gains will have their eyes gouged.
Drug dealers and makers of adulterated pharmaceuticals will be fried in cauldrons of oil.
Those who swindle women and children will have their hearts gored by a stone bore.
Those who cut corners shall be eaten by predators and snakes.
Those who show no respect for elders shall be subject to disembowelment by a giant scale.
Rapists and murderers will be dismembered by the five demons.
Thieves, kidnappers, and con artists will be put into a grinding machine and ground to a bloody pulp.
The limbs of bandits, murderers, and highwaymen shall be hacked off.
Women who disobey their mothers and fathers-in-law will be crushed by giant rocks.
Human traffickers and those who take advantage of vulnerable women will have their faces disfigured and skinned by metal blades.
Swindlers of money and those who cause their victims to commit suicide shall have their bowels removed.
Gamblers, fraudsters, and those who sell counterfeit products will have their guts cut open.
Rumormongers shall have their tongues pulled out and their cheeks gored.
After sinners drink Meng Po’s tea of oblivion, they are given a certificate to return to the world of mortals in the form of an infant.
Level 13 feels like a personal gripe, and it's striking that the sellers of counterfeit products occupy a deeper level than rapists and murderers.
But who is this for?
Is this place a cautionary tale for the believer who might take a wrong moral turn? A godsend for frazzled parents who want to tame their children? Or is it the equivalent of rubbernecking at a wreck, an attraction that offers the cheap rush of self-righteousness, an opportunity for those who aren’t selling adulterated pharmaceuticals to feel smug in knowing this suffering will not be theirs?
And what is hell for?
I think it speaks to a craving for justice, the need to know the monsters among us, even if they have escaped the punishment of our earthbound institutions, will pay what’s owed in the afterlife. And it’s hard to imagine a rougher hell than being trapped with a squeaky mechanical demon performing the same mindless gesture until the end of time.
As for heaven? Lots of tea and board games. The human brain is endlessly inventive when it comes to suffering, but the prospect of eternal salvation seems to leave us at a loss.
You have to really want to get to the island of Naoshima. A bullet train from Tokyo across five hundred miles in two hours. A sluggish taxi ride along a coastal road with five thousand stoplights. A ferry among the islands with muted freighters on the horizon, cutting through the fog.
Squid ink curry is my new favorite food.
Eliminating photography at museums is a righteous policy, although I was initially vexed by the need to take pictures to prove I had witnessed a piece of art. Nowadays, taking a picture is how we see an image or event, an amplified echo of Susan Sontag’s declaration in ’77 that “today everything exists to end in a photograph.” But this phantom twitch quickly faded as we moved through Tadao Ando’s severe concrete halls, and I was delighted to discover I was experiencing art with strangers in a way I hadn’t since the early 2000s. We weren’t ducking out of the way of each other’s shots. We lingered longer. Even the roomful of Monets held my interest.
Walter de Maria, Time/Timeless/No Time (2004). Chichu Art Museum, Japan. Image: Mitsuo Matsuoka
But how to deal with a gigantic marble orb on a concrete staircase surrounded by dozens of golden three-pronged statues? To start, we moved around it slowly. We hunted for patterns and imagined the rituals that might occur in such a place. We lingered long enough that its strangeness became familiar, and soon we were dealing with it on its terms.
I enjoyed the ritual of removing my shoes before entering a gallery. It was somehow both formal and intimate. And quieter.
James Turrell's room of hyper-blue light gnawed at my peripheral vision until I was on the edge of a big-budget hallucination, unsure if he meant for me to be seeing what I was seeing.
The town of Hommura on the island Naoshima
We walked through a tiny silent town that smelled like a sauna. The wooden buildings were elegantly charred, and a sign above a shuttered door said Fortune Favors a Merry Home.
Fifty-two degrees is the threshold between a light and a heavy sweater.
For the first two nights, we dined next to a stern young couple who were always holding hands. The boy wore an oversized black coat, she floated within a billowy skirt, and I never saw them speak. They looked like they stepped out of an Aubrey Beardsley print, and I’m surprised how heartened I was to see that Romanticism is still kicking.
Lee Ufan, Relatum-Silence (2010). Lee Ufan Museum, Naoshima.
I was moved by a hunched boulder that appeared to pray before a glossy sheet of metal.
A line from Tatsuo Miyajima caught my attention: Keep changing. Connect with everything. Continue forever. I purchased a copy of his sketchbook, and C. bought a letter-opener shaped like a bird.
I always get drowsy on ferries. It’s such a fight to stay awake. The amniotic rocking of the waves, I guess.
Japan has the best coffee, especially the cans of iced black charcoal.
On the island of Teshima, we took a long rainy walk down an empty road to get our heartbeats archived for posterity at Christian Boltanski's Les Archives du Cœur, where a lone lightbulb in a dark hallway pulses to the beat of any one of the 90,000 archived heartbeats, generating the effect of a sinister rave in a forgotten factory.
You’re given two attempts to record your heartbeat. My first recording was a slow industrial thump that made me grateful for all the time I've spent running, but there was a slight scuffle against my shirt, so I tried again. The second recording was a disaster, and now the sound of a microphone snaking through a noisy forest of chest hair has been archived for eternity.
Postcards from Ryue Nishizawa and Rei Naito's Matrix, where photography is forbidden.
I believe the function of art is to create a situation where language falls apart, and this happened at Teshima. An absolute hush came upon me when I stepped into the strange curves of Ryue Nishizawa and Rei Naito's Matrix. Beneath the oval of a cloudy sky, droplets of water darted across the concrete to join larger rivulets that fed into a puddle. It's a remarkable feat to make water look alien.
But is there a correlation between the effort required to view a work of art and the degree of my appreciation for it? Perhaps this is why I've never felt anything close to the sublime while flicking through images on a screen.
Is a digital sublime possible?
In America, the men's restroom is typically a site of unconscionable body horror. But in Japan, even the public restroom at a far-flung bus station was immaculate. My home country is fucking barbaric.
Nodded off in a taxi crammed with screens that blared demented commercials for ambiguous products. The effect was like watching a film from a century ago: everyone was smiling too fast and the frame rate was wrong.
Twnty minutes later, minimalism reaches its vanishing point: unable to find the door to our hotel, we’re about to give up when two concrete slabs slide open to reveal a young man who takes our luggage and our shoes.
Socks that give the sinister effect of cloven feet.
An exhausted but persistent corner of my brain keeps reciting these lines from the Surrealist Manifesto: “Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.”
The rare and tiny trashcans in Tokyo make me feel like a gluttonous and negligent beast, constantly shedding bottles, wrappers, and receipts.
I woke up sweaty from a dream in which I could hear everything except my own voice.
Jinbōchō, Tokyo
The Tokyo streets are busy yet hushed, and I cannot put my finger on the sounds that are missing. Shouting? Laughter? Police sirens and angry horns?
But living fourteen hours in the future is fantastic. Wake up and squint at the news back home. Alright, so that’s what America did today. Now they’ve gone to sleep and I can enjoy not thinking about the president for a while.
Nobody in Tokyo seems to wears sunglasses except for me and C. even though it’s unusually bright.
I say sumimasen constantly and enthusiastically.
Fifty degrees might be the line between a light sweater and a heavy sweater.
In Chiyoda City, there's an endless street of used bookshops where so many people, mostly middle-aged men, quietly peruse decades-old publications about astrology and jazz and George Lucas and aerobics.
And god, dig all these middle-aged Japanese men with fine-tuned haircuts and selvage denim and understated sneakers.
Otemachi One Tower, Tokyo
I had an elaborate fantasy of picking up smoking again and pretending I’m in Tokyo Vice, but there’s no smoking on the streets of Tokyo. It’s a ¥2000 fine, about fourteen dollars. I want to live in the future with the aesthetics of 1971.
But holy christ, it feels so good and lucky to be seven thousand miles away from America—like running away from an awful odor or the sweet relief that comes when a car alarm suddenly falls silent.
Learned to find freedom through the ritualized dressing and undressing and scrubbing and soaking in the onsen.
I’m disoriented enough that at one point while orbiting Tokyo Dome City, I found myself earnestly saying, “The sun sets in the west here.”
But why does talking about God feel so tacky? Strange how the grammar of damage is so vivid and precise, endlessly inventive—torched, shanked, concussed—while the vocabulary of peace remains squelchy and limp, reduced to cloudy words like serenity and bliss. I do not know how to speak about faith without feeling embarrassed, annoyed at the saccharine pitch in my voice. Language fails. Hell can be described a thousand ways, but heaven remains impossible to grasp.
Whenever I think about taking a leap of faith, a fork in the road appears: I’ll either become a wild-eyed zealot who wears a sandwich board, or I’ll have the self-satisfied smile of the public radio listener who speaks of energies and crystals. Agnosticism, atheism, nihilism, and even cosmic horror are more appealing than these options. So I turn away from the path and retreat into the familiar, even easy, life of doubt.
Yet the craving to become spiritualized persists.
Meanwhile, grocery stores are limiting eggs to a dozen per customer per day. Last week, the president said he wanted to kick everybody out of an ancient land so he could build luxury hotels that would transform it into the Riviera of the Middle East. Last month, the richest man in the world gave the Nazi salute three times at a political function, and the newspapers-of-record interpreted it as misguided enthusiasm.
I often imagine my writing sessions should be quiet and humble, like those stern Dutch paintings of solitary women making lace in solemn bands of light.
I still have vivid dreams that my mother is still alive; I find her sitting at a kitchen table in a tiny house by the sea, living under an assumed name.
Service plazas are modern works of art where I can eat slick food next to twelve lanes of humming traffic, lording over a glittering river of steel and glass.
The sun went down at 8:49pm, the moon is in its last quarter, and tonight I'm wondering if the health of a society can be pegged to the nerves of its motorists.
