Here we are in Ikebukuro, one of the sleaziest parts of Tokyo, killing time before we catch the train to the airport and head off for Vietnam on the second part of our Truly Asia tour, in search of Yam Yam and his/her Pangs. Tokyo is very exhausting, but if you can figure out the…

We just had the most extreme yakitori experience in Ikebukuro, pole position next to the master of his domain, a chef whose power animal must be either a small agile bear or a racoon (actually, I’d rather liken him to a crouching tiger). Japanese restaurants break so many OHS and union regulations, it is a…

Okay, here I am in the real Sprawl, aka Japan. Woah. Haiku conference went well, tho I have to admit to slight fatigue – too many people cross the line between haiku and spirituality for my liking. They are only poems people. Only wrote about four haiku in three days. Went to Kyoto which is…

Yam Yam Pang refers to the strange habit of some designers of placing odd English words together and placing them on bags, t-shirts and the like, leading to a weird po-mo kind of garble intelligible to no one. Hi from Japan, home of the Pang. Presently in Shinjuku, 10pm, wishing I was wearing sunglasses. Neon…

Now that the embargo has ended on mentioning UQP’s Best Australian Poetry of 2003, I can breathe a sigh of relief and inform you, in all openness, that I am in it. Or at least, a poem of mine is in it. “In A Dim Sea Nation” was first published in papertiger #2 last year.…

I’ll just continue on tinkering away here, in self-imposed exile, on the deck of my careening schooner. Some people grow gardenias. Others derive simple pleasure from a McDonalds brown paper bag, stuffing themselves with shit on public transport, gloating. Maybe a cultural studies academic could write a brief, but explosive diatribe on the issue. The…

Sorry not to have written before now, it’s a long story but before I tell it, I just wanted to say i miss you, but I know you’re having a really incredible time. Soweto sounds like just the kind of place every person in the western world needs to see, at least once. How incredibly…

Re the flight – yeah, it was hellish, bumpy and scary on the way to LA and very long. But the flight to NYC was only five hours, and we got to see some pretty amazing stuff out the window – deserts, snow covered mountains (in the desert), hundreds of miles of farms in squares…

The heavens opened at Camp Davey this afternoon, as God wept upon learning that “islands in the stream of consciousness”, the stand-out track from Davey Dreamnation’s album of the same name, has finally been released on mp3.com.au. “This is what we used to call progress in the olden days, before international websites, downloads and all…

The great thing about Internet technology is that it allows you to see how and why people arrive at your site. While, naturally, thousands and thousands of Davey Dreamnation’s fans find his international website by typing “davey + dreamnation” into Google, some people just weren’t meant to be here. The following five examples are cases…