Leonardo Boiko’s Diary

Then one day you say the wrong thing to the wrong person and bam!, you’re fired
and forgotten,
with barely a word of goodbye from Maya,
blown by the wind in the streets
with the waves of other discarded bourgeois youth,
we the losers.

The machine hungers for new blood.

A quarter century, and back to the starting point. Not much to show for all the trouble — a couple babies, a resume full of too-short jobs, a few boxes of the antidepressants I now can’t afford, too many books, too much debt. But it doesn’t matter. In the town nothing’s real except the town. It’s morning and grandma is baking me cake.

We wanderers are protected by Kron, god of change. If we stay too much time in the same place, Kron will send powerful winds to blow us all the way back. That’s a reminder of our eternal destiny as wanderers.

(A wanderer from Fuurai no Shiren, SNES)

man I just love Colors for the Nintendo DS :D

Found in 4chan, unknown source.

The word “natural” has become overused to the point of losing its meaning. Nonetheless, I find myself surprisingly optimistic. It may be confirmation bias, but it appears to me the environmental movement is finally bearing fruit; after being politicized, absorbed by the amoeba of consumerism, given its own address in Babylon — no one noticed all the while it was spreading seeds; as the “movement” corpse fossilized, it gave birth to a thousand natural “lifestyles”.

People today are richer than ever, more knowledgeable than ever, more powerful than ever. It was to be expected for modern age to cause an explosion of consumerist excess. But now they finally appear to be finding that excess has a bitter aftertaste. Two generations ago, people wanted more money; today they want less work.

They say in Japan, a post-crisis advanced economy, cars have lost their meaning as markers of social status. Young people are not interested in cars; they find it’s a crude, troublesome gadget for outdated tastes. “Not prizing treasures difficult to obtain keeps people from committing theft” —not having an expensive car and mansion saves you the pain in the ass that are alarms and dogs and insurances and electric fences.

They say the USA are facing an unprecedented crisis of their own right now. Hopefully they’ll find the same solution.

Natural: eating when you’re hungry, sleeping when you’re sleepy. Finding the path of least resistance, like water: Slow life. Natural buildings. Bicycling instead of driving. Eating local food. Reusing electronic components, fetishizing outdated technology. Giving things instead of throwing away. Preserving local culture out of romantic nostalgia; local culture you did not grow up with because your parents were too busy being normal. Picking scraps of clothing and wood and furniture from the trash for your own creations. A return of the ethos of hospitality.

My utopia is a society where everyone is a hobbyist, a dabbler, where things like Wikipedia and Craft and Instructables are the new practical education — a society not of consumers, but of makers.

I hate computers. I will sell my computer and buy a guitar. I’m getting outa this bland purgatorium of a city this week and I will be back to the study of art and literature and comic books. I will be a scholar and travel the world and buy a house in Kyōto and have ten boyfriends and ten girlfriends of all colors and sizes and tongues. I will sow the seed of dissent right in the middle of society and watch smiling as my cute spawn disrupts patriarchy from the inside.

I am 0% Pill Leoboiko, and am about to stop existing.

I become fully manifested two or three days after my body goes clean of antidepressants. Once the harshest pains of withdrawal are appeased - once the dizziness and nausea and brain jolts are tolerable enough for me to think - I wake up and look around, take a deep breath and shake my wings only to find I no longer have any. Then I’m overwhelmed by despair so strong I can’t even go through the motions of the basest vital needs, say feeding or getting up. They call it “depression”, this glass cage, this chained blood –I call it insight. I call it reality. I cannot handle it at all.

So I suicide softly with the magic potions, and suddenly the pain is gone and a strange spirit possess this abandoned body. I call him, I call this entity the 100% Pill Leoboiko. 100% Pill Leoboiko doesn’t care much about love or sex or the madness and beauty of art and life, and while he’s not exactly content with selling himself to the corporate religion he’s at least resigned –“have to do it for my family”, he says (myself, I’d be ashamed of presenting such a boring failure of a figure as the model of a family). He’s not “happy” (if such a thing even exists), but he kind of enjoy going home after a day of hard work and watch in silent contemplation as time drips by.

* * *

If I close my eyes, even for minutes, the night-mares catch up with me, rendering me terrified and paralysed and hallucinating alone in the dark.

The Other has no such problems. He’s unable to dream.

* * *

I’m throwing the drugs away, I’m thinking of myself now, I’m taking my life back. Only I’m not, of course. I feel too old to even fantasize about that —thirty years aged in two —I’m swallowing my dearest serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor this very moment. There, good boy, well-behaved boy. I’ll be gone in a few minutes now. Hope you do well, Other; as a last jest, this clown sings for you to remember that—

if the dam breaks open many years too soon
and if there is no room upon the hill
and if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you in the dark side of the moon

• I can’t stand the “look but don’t touch” feel of the Western art tradition. I mean, I really can’t stand it. My æsthetic tastes were formed by the tea ceremony, which like the West features deep respect for beautiful objects — but where Western art expresses that respect by isolating the pieces behind a dozen “keep distance” signs, Japanese art was made to be manipulated, interacted, passed from hand to hand, exalted by the human touch instead of by its avoidance — when I visit a museum I find the aura of sanctity to be unbearable, like if I was a pig in a church.

  I just went to an exhibition where the artist made a room wholly in red — walls, furniture, lamps, everything. It had a cozy feeling to it, like if one had just entered James Bond’s bedroom right in the middle of a spy-movie opening. Forgetting the chains and warnings of the Museum for a moment, me and my daughter promptly proceeded to try out red hats and glasses and sit in red sofas, only to be politely but firmly told not to touch anything. What’s the point?

  (Side note: The artist put a Brazilian Hermes Lettera portable typewriter in there, but she didn’t notice the Lettera is not really red —it’s orangeish. That’s why I spray-painted mine 8)

• When Andy placed commercial, mass-produced designs right in the middle of the Museum’s holy ground, it was shocking and innovative because it went counter to what everyone believed art to be back then. In the sixties. Since then, pasting a logo a hundred times is not shocking nor innovative anymore. Seriously, guys, stop. Think of something yourselves.

  It’s ironic that pop-art backfired: in its attempt to take Real Art down from the pedestal, it ended up there herself — and now chocolate wrapping paper is raised to the realm of elitism by painters who can’t draw, while the bourgeois middle-class audience either pretend there’s some mysterious meaning to it or whines that “my son could do better”. The beast is tamed; pop is unpopped.

This weekend’s art project: 1992 Brazilian walkthrough guide Guia Games redone in New Games Journalism style.

Only the first game is done, mind you; this will be a serialization. Expect a feed in the next few days.

Update: feed now at http://namakajiri.net/the-guia-games-project/feed.xml.

I’m always talking big about reality-based parenting — that is, never lying to your kids nor hiding them from the truth about death, poverty, injustice, the non-existence of Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, the afterlife, or God. People always make this funny look on their faces — you’re ruining their childhood without fantasy! I’m like wtf, do you know who are you talking to? I read fiction like I drink water, several books per month plus hundreds of comic books and games and cartoons — I spend more time with fantasy than reality; I’m way more involved with fantasy than any of them Santa Claus advocates. By a childhood “with fantasy” they mean, of course, lying to them that fantasy is real; but, as a lover of fantasy, I know good stories have no need for such lies — and I know children are more than smart enough to tell make-believe from truth.

Having said that, I figure I’m being a fucking hypocrite with my disgust for “curriculum parents” — the kind of parent who enrolls his kids in a dozen language courses and personal improvement whatnots, “paving their future” with a cash carpet. The thing is, they are right — they are making their kids’ future “better”, albeit for an awfully short-sighted, ignorant measure of betterness. I, OTOH, am rising my children for art — but art is a lie. What right have I to tell them to get away from the dehumanizing corporate machine, to shut their ears to the siren call of consumerism, to seek their interests and become great human beings — when I myself have sold my soul and prostituted my mind?

Art is my religion, it’s the particular lie I chose to believe in to make the bleak reality tolerable — passing it on to my kids and sheltering them from the System is exactly the same as telling tales of Heaven to shelter them from death. Perhaps there’s no escape from the parental sin.

Here, I’ll compare them in table format so that you non–comic-book-readers can see for yourselves how Constantine is the worst character assassination ever. Last line is spoilerish, select to see:

Real John Constantine	Movie Wanker Constantine
Exceedingly British blond amoral occultist bastard	American black-haired occultist antihero
Sarcastic ex-punk-rocker modeled after Sting	Played by Keanu Reeves, emotionless robot
Dresses in an untidy pulp-fiction–like tan trenchcoat	Dresses in smart Matrix Black
Is a manipulative social engineer who hates direct conflict	Blows up demons with holy shotguns
Primary motivations: 1) stir the Hell’s pot, then 2) get away from the trouble	Primary motivations: 1) get into Heaven, 2) save Earth from demons
Forced Satan to heal his lung cancer and keep him alive by selling his soul to two other demons simultaneously, thus preventing any of them from claiming it; then resumed smoking	Forced Satan to heal his lung cancer by nobly sacrificing himself to save an innocent, thus accumulating enough karma points to go to heaven; then stopped smoking

• That round is better than sharp.
• That depth is better than flatness.
• That symmetry is better than assimetry.
• That gradients, transparency, and reflexivity are better than solid colors.

we step over the holes in the pavement, broken concrete and bent traffic signs, schoolgirls’ graffiti, old cars grunting weird fumes, anonymous remains of old posters forever glued to lead paint, pidgeons in the trash, anti-hobo metal teeth, granite tributes no one reads to people no one knows — the city are ruins of something unknown, debris of work in progress, holes left by the past like fossils, some sort of collective dream now as dead as the collective itself — we have our soma, our jobs and mp3 players, our bars and blogs and books, a billion ways to not think — television was the real death of religion — the city, ruins of an era when stuff was real, a giant pile of no big deal, plato’s ultimate failure.