We are in the season of sweaty air and blurriness in Kamakura. Mt Fuji is currently concealed behind a curtain of milky vapour. Sometimes its tip appears, like something beneath a white dust sheet, or an elbow against a sodden shower curtain, before retreating again. Massive pregnant clouds amble overhead, shrinking our skies, and everything feels a little too close.

A little rot is starting to creep in at the edges of things. Fallen cicadas are being dissected by diligent teams of ants. Butterflies face the same fate. In these roadside operations, it’s the wings that tend to go first. Tattered gossamer and broken resplendence move in stuttered slow-motion on the backs of ants.

Tinges of exhaustion have appeared on the plants. Sun-singed or sun-blanched, they begin to give themselves over to the rot. The tension is broken by choruses of crickets washing the evening air with their song. White lilies have begun appearing in gardens, on hillsides and in empty plots, thrusting themselves up through the exhaustion. In the damp blue of night, they look like quivering ghosts in the corners of my garden.

Neither my neighbours nor I planted these lilies, no one did and yet they show up every year. Perhaps this is the definition of a stubborn weed and for this reason I have given up on such classifications. I’ve even started to look forward to their appearance. They belong here now. Little gifts from the mountains. Little ghosts by night. In a time of sweaty air and a little rot.

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I want to tell you how a part of me wanted to rise with breeze and whip through its streets like a laughing child. I want to tell you how I act…

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Mushrooms are sprouting in my garden and they make me uneasy. The mushrooms are small, milky brown and look like conjoined leathery pebbles. They crouch in clusters at the ankles of the line of shir…

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Centuries have learnt to live together in Rome. The way blood learns blood. The way old quarrels lose their burn b…

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Last week a typhoon dragged itself over our streets. It arrived carrying ripe humidity. Breathing felt like eating.

I stayed home. …

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I went to Florence and watched Medusa die all over again.

He has been holding her head like that for centuries now. With his arm raised, he h…

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“Early in my career I took to heart an observation from E. L. Doctorow that suggests that transgression is the life and soul of art-making and to be creative you must be in touch with the forbidden.”

…

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Guard it the way you would a small flame in bad weather.

Life will offer a thousand reasons to trade it away. Deadlines. Metrics. Bills. The endless machinery of modern…

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“We can never go back”

—Bell Hooks

It’s Tuesday morning but I feel like it might actually be Monday. This happens to me often when times are eventful, the days spit and bump into each other like hoolig…

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“You were talking about things they couldn’t see and they were laughing”

—Cy Twombly

I stayed in the gallery for a long time looking at this painting.

After a while the room around me dissolved. The noi…

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a thought:

Part of the beauty of writing is letting language loosen and wander beside your imagination. As long as the feeling arrives intact, there i…

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So what was this offensive image?

A candid shot taken in Rome. Yes, it’s rubbish. Rubbish piled on a street. Rubbish overflowing. My offence, it seems, was that I showed a negative side of the Eternal City. As though acknowledging what exists in public view is somehow an act of betrayal. As though cities must only be photographed in ways that comfort postcards. It’s strange, isn’t it? This expectation of how a city should be documented and portrayed.

Truth is, I was never interested in the rubbish as spectacle. Rubbish is super ordinary after all. And I am always drawn to the wordless ways a city talks to us. In this instance, I was looking for a glimpse of how people live in the city, and how the city responds.

Rubbish, believe it or not, is an eloquent urban narrator. It’s one of the city’s many mouths. One of the ways it tells on itself. It might not be neat, polite or pretty with its prose, but it sure is honest. What swells at the pavements are truths about its citizens’ appetites, but there are also songs of exhaustion, loneliness, excess, survival, consumption and reinvention in its chorus.

I think most people who connect with super ordinary life can make these connections and can see that there is something deeply human in the overflow. Maybe that’s why it unsettles people. Because rubbish, in all its supposed ugliness, sits there, undoing the fantasy. Squatting at the edges of the postcard. Telling on us. Spilling private lives into public view. Digesting itself in public. It makes it so easy to turn away from.

Rubbish. The way it is handled by citizens and managed by local authorities tells us so much about a place.

P.S. even postcards sometimes end up in the rubbish.

His little hands were covered in gold stars. One at first. Then another. Then too many to count properly.

Why a star?
Why gold?

Questions that loosen the screws in an adulthood on autopilot. So instead …

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The way it says no without raising its voice. The way it holds a line. I know it’s just a bit of metal or wood, but it still manages to say. this is as far as you get!

…

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