CURRENT MISSION

Clash with cultures, shed self, replace former self with clash debris, repeat. Think with thinkers, do with doers. Everywhere.

ABOUT ME

Just another creature from Rustbelt USA doing my best to go places my parents couldn't, do some brain broadening, friend making, pan frying, instrument playing and life lovin.

Working several 13 hour shifts per week doing cruddy work just to get that first plane ticket out into the world... that was seven years ago and I've been hooked on the planet ever since.

Lived for 3 years in China and Japan. Currently a member of the Japanese delegation to the United Nations in New York.

PHILOSOPHY

Oh well it was worth it

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Do my best to keep an open house for folks no matter which country I'm in at the time -- music swaps and food collaborations ALWAYS welcome.

Interests

Reading/researching as an OCD behavior, vegan lemon poppy seed muffins, spicy Hunan dishes, utter absurdity, regarding everything as a potential musical instrument, falafel, rain and mist, the tactile experience of placing a needle on a record, dumpstering delicious cookies and broken records with the absolute best Irish jigs and reels, reconciling abstractions with the concrete, Jarry and Artaud and other theatre crazies, explosion art, reductionism, psychic automatism, love

• arts
• dining
• vegan
• reading
• music
• rock climbing

Music, Movies, and Books

MUSIC: Afghan/Turkish/Chinese/American/Everywhere folk, left-field house, garage, east coast/memphis raps, vocalese, space jazz, Cambodian pop singers swallowed by the Khmer Rouge, bizarrely wonderful, microglitch, experimental Erhu, bossanova, jive, drone, texas blues, ambient soundscapes, psych, vocals without a leash, zoomoozophones, cantankerous funk, scratchy violins, screechy piccolos, nauseating trumpets, et cetera, et cetera

FILMS/DIRECTORS: Kim Ki Duk, Majid Majidi, Cai Ming-Liang, Bahman Ghobadi, Werner Herzog, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Emir Kusturica, Jiang Wen, Peter Greenaway, Jan Å vankmajer, Takeshi Kitano, Ken Loach, Jacques Tati, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel, Buster Keaton, and of course Luc Besson, one of the few who pump greatness into the mainstream.

Tod Browning's "Freaks"
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s "Hausu (House)"
Dr. Suess's "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T"
Andrzej Munk's "Zezowate Szczescie (Bad Luck)"

And, admittedly, Terayama Shuji's "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" for the making-folks-squirm value.

BOOKS: All of those philosopholks and psychoanalyticats ... Foucauldian Gramsci crackers with cold Zizek and a sprig of Lacanian Butlerisms... including several as yet unidentified masked accomplices. Poems/writings/plays of Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud, Brecht, Ionesco. Finished my first novel in years (The Idiot), and more often poke my nose into some ZMedia sociopolitical gobbledygook, random Chinese history/social theory/und so weiter. Oh, Xu Bing! And if you haven't seen or "read" the Codex Seraphinanius, grab it now from the web. Better yet, do it five minutes ago.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Climbing a giant green mountain range speckled with dairy cows, making sticky rice cakes in a tiny village with a cartoon-style wooden mallet, campin' it in the Gobi, farmin' it in Guangdong

Countries I’ve Visited

Barbados, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates

Countries I’ve Lived In

China, Japan, United States