Tag: timbertop

Japan Gets Real

Along with new voices.

(updated: 21 April 2024)

I’d always known about Japan. From a very young age, I saw the Japanese characters on the back of soy milk cartons, along with Astro Boy on television. In 1988, I learned Japanese. My dad’s good friend had a Japanese wife. Also, we had some Japanese neighbours in the apartment building in 1987 whereby Mikito Fujimoto and a bunch of us would go to the Fun Factory and blow our coins on Double Dragon and Dragon Ninja.

Mikito was an only child and his dad was a hairdresser. I’m pretty sure their visa application was rejected and they returned to Japan. He brought over his Famicom and used it here and that was amazing to me. He struggled with English but we all made it work somehow and he was a lot of fun.

Back then, we had a Honda Accord and on my way to learning Karate in 1995, I learned Tae Kwon Do at the time too.

Yet mostly I dreaded Thursday’s Tae Kwon Do class because at 2 – 2.5 hours, it was so tiring and stressful. It was also a fair drive to reach the Camberwell Civic Centre. One time, the car ran out of petrol and literally rolled into the servo next door. And that’s the way the class made me feel so often.

But, under the guidance of Jack Rozinsky, I ended up with a yellow belt and two stripes before stopping. Karate in 1995 was with Sensei Joe, which I preferred.

I won an award “Most Spirited Senior” that year and was somewhat sad to give it up due to study commitments and a desire to change my physicality. I threw away the trophy recently due to it dropping, but should have a photo of it somewhere. I remember sparring competitively with another Jewish guy double my age (Jonathan?) at the second-floor venue in Cato Street.

One of my school friends Peter was doing Chikara style Karate at the time but at a different association and when he found out about the commonality on a lunch break, he played me Pantera in his walkman. He was into the game Street Fighter II a few years earlier and used to emulate the moves he saw and take on the whole theatrical effect.


I went to Japan in December that year too and for the first and only time, I bleached my hair with Tina in Greville Street for the school holidays.

[pic 4: Kobe post earthquake??]

That trip was with Jun whose immediate family lived in Japan and I knew him from Geelong Grammar, Timbertop.

[ Jun on bottom bunk, in front of Use Your Illusion II poster ]

He slept in the bed next to mine and in fact, on about 3 occasions  in the middle of the night I heard (and saw) him sit up and speak a completely alien language to me. No one else witnessed it, and he knew nothing of it personally. At the time, he was on the top bunk, not bottom. Song and Jun must’ve switched.

It wasn’t just a few words either, the monologues would go on for 2-5 minutes and were very fluent. They really should’ve woken up other people but did not.

And Jun was very often the last person to make the breakfast line-up, right after me. Re-orienting with illusion?

The lingo used for sleeping back then was “spine-bashing” and “departured” and it was a favourite pastime for many.

Today, very rarely I might hear music in my dreams – if only I could access it in waking life, like Lenny Kravitz. Perhaps people access past lives too: and languages. I had a massive download in a sleep in Jerusalem in 2005 – maybe that was Jun’s?

I should’ve tried sleeping on the roof.

Another school friend Sascha (brown jacket below) and Jun’s cousin (pink jacket) also made it over as Jun is Australian/Japanese.

There was a lot to take in including skiing at Tenjindaira with incredible amounts of snow (compared to Mount Buller) and at one point Jun and I spent 45 minutes looking for a ski. I took a fall in the powder and somersaulted and the ski was at the top of landing spot, not down the hill where I stopped. I also recorded a video of me skiing to the base of the mountain, but the camera was on full zoom so it came out poorly.

Anyhow, in Tokyo, January 1996, I checked out the the Elvin Jones Special Quartet with Wynton Marsalis at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan. I missed Jamiroquai by a few weeks light years.


But, by chance Prince came through a night-club that I was at with his massive entourage. I had last seen him in concert in April 1992 for Diamonds and Pearls. He played a number of shows in Japan also in January 1996. I’m not sure if he came through after his concert but I did see him from about 10 meters away despite me not trying to get a glimpse as he strutted across the dance floor to his next destination.

I bought a number of CDs as well: R. Kelly self-titled, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (on Sascha’s recommendation,) Jesus Wept and Back from the Raggedy Edge. All these albums came out a few months prior to me arriving. I really was very fortunate to be able to make the trip to Japan and am very grateful for it.

Continuing, I started Bagua and Yoga in 1997 and became vegan for a period of time. I also gave Pilates a few sessions.

But was I heading in the right direction with my menu? I was using a book to learn some of my Yoga poses. Was it enough?

I was still eager to find new voices, even if I didn’t understand them at first.

So via Sugihara, Japan provided a lifeline for my grandparents during the war on the way to Australia, so where was the next stop? Back to Japan?

TLC released great tracks in 1995, which I first heard in Japan, and I mashed up in Israel in 2013.

So is that where I would find flow?

The plot thickens: how do Israelis find flow?

alike:

1 2 3 4 …

✓ 1 day ago

1993: Shorn Right!

Bad hair days be damned and seeking other solutions!

(updated: 21 April 2024)

I was never sure what to do about my hair when I arrived at Timbertop. I liked my hair but wanted something lower maintenance so decided to get a “blade 2.”

In my hike group, ‘Peck’ (below middle, black t-shirt) took the photo above left and ended up getting a blade 1, I think a couple of weeks after me. It was insane.

But both our hair grew back by term 4 to the point where I was asked to get it cut.

Whatever we did, it worked and I picked up equal first in the photo competition (below left with Sight Regained t-shirt) at the end of Term 1.

Also, our hike group of 6 people picked up 3rd place at the hiking awards for the distance we traveled at the end of the year with our group leader (Lachie – above, Dolphins cap) receiving a free jacket. In that group, I did most of the navigation with Peck.

Danay’s group scored first place – they all got jackets and a girl’s group led by a Japanese girl came in second. I think that was the case.

Getting a blade 2 before anyone else was the tough thing to do and a lot of people were checking it out.

  • pic 2,3 – unit master Smith.
  • pic 4,5 –  “Passover or Passout?” with Matt and Father Tas, 5 April 1993. [pic 4 was also in the school magazine with a description]

Matt’s not technically Jewish and it was very gracious of him to attend. More could be said about the passover but I’d have to double check with a few others first.

Speaking of which, I met Wolps at Timbetop and he lived near me and we actually hung out a few times in the subsequent years. I hope he’s doing well. The last time I saw him was in late 1999 when I encountered him at the end of Huntingfield Road by chance with JP (I am pretty sure that that is what occurred.)

Looking back at my life, I’ve missed so many formal occasions, I can only see it as character-building and a means of differentiation – Rites of Passage or Rites of Destruction? Religion divides as much as it unifies in this day and age. And for some, a Jewish guy married to a gentile is not even seen as married at all and that the wife could/should convert. As such, I’m not doing too badly. It’s also impossible to convert to another religion – you’re just confused.

There’s no map to the promised land – for me at least. Does one swim upstream or downstream? Is there even a choice? And I met a religious guy in Israel that aimed to do away with all the mitzvot and just attain the wisdom behind their underlying sefirot – a different kind of observance – but even that knowledge has been corrupted I suspect. Some people think that this life is all about attaining rebirth in the World-To-Come. Beam me up, Scotty!

Anyway, so my haircut was also a rebellion from my younger years when I refused to even get a haircut.

[Tasmania – first plane trip away from Melbourne]

With the curls, random women would come up and tell me how much they loved my hair and I would say that I hated it – probably due to the compliments but I still didn’t want to get a cut: I thought it would hurt! Something like that attention then happened at school but due to the lack of hair.

Due to the attention, after the blade 2, and until it grew out a bit, I covered my head with a beanie and picked up the nickname “Champ” in the process. That was from big ‘Griffo’ who had just tried it on and was with Ro at the time (below – V-neck + white t-shirt + CAT cap) on a walking path.

  • pic 2,3 – Bluff Hut for unit campout

It was actually a really empowering nickname – I kind of had to live up to it. I’m not sure many girls used it. And there was another Champ there at the time who was Thai and that was his real name but I don’t think we ever spoke.

The Champion brand was unknown to Australia at the time and my mum brought it back from Chicago a couple of years earlier.

Kris (blue jumper above with red t-shirt) took the photo below and has since become a professional portrait photographer.

I ended up leaving Geelong Grammar as my plan was always to do the International Baccalaureate there, but it was shorn out of the syllabus.

What did I expect?

But I never ended up doing IB anyway due to poor French performance, and I did do VCE Media (1+2) in Year 10 which was new at the time. A few other people ended up at Wesley like JP and a few girls. I had trouble sleeping in a roomful of people… those damn sleepwalkers – maybe that was it. But hey, I snored sometimes. So on many a night I was the last person to “depart” so I departed myself.

Going back to board – all aboard!

[ Waiting to get onboard the bus at Spencer Street station. Miles (rightmost, above left + light green jacket, above right) who I knew from my earlier Glamorgan stint whereby I came into the school already knowing good people. ]

Quality of sleep is something I should discuss at a later point as I had nightmares for many years starting in the early-mid-2000s I think. But not really anymore. There were also dreams of euphoria, and then various combinations of the two as the mind-body complex healed and purified from the soul outward. Healed from what, though?

  1. Original sin?
  2. Nanotechnology infiltration with a biblical past?
  3. Abandonment of Torah/Mitzvos?
  4. Individual or collective pain-body?
  5. Unfulfilled Jungian archetypes?
  6. Not resonating with past lives and the soul’s journey?

…with those perspectives being in response to a foreign yet innate self-regulating process contained within my perception. Opening up the hurt-locker for a spring clean.

In our unit in 1993, Geordie was very apt at hitting the snooze button and he did it a lot, and he also ended up school captain a few years later.

[ Geordie – far right checker shirt + red t-shirt, further up, behind wheelbarrow]

He could really keep his humor through anything – even waking up. Within months of graduation, he fell asleep at the wheel of his car and passed away – may he rest in peace. But in reality, no one really knew what happened during his ride home or wherever he was going – I think that that was the consensus at the time and I haven’t followed it up at all since that point. I think he insisted on leaving a late-night party alone instead of staying the night but I’d have to look into it further – his family should have more information on the matter.

The “sleep theory” is one I made months or weeks after the funeral. It’s like he was James Dean or something. Only the good die young, as they say, but at least someone told me about it (Andy.) I hadn’t seen the chap in years prior to his passing. His funeral was very sad, including for myself.

These days I prefer to see myself as waking-up more than anything else, and creating my own version of “woke,” if it’s possible. The beauty of life is that any type of meaning can be attached to it, it seems, but for how long remains in question. But I am always happy to laugh at how seriously I take myself.


✓ 2 days ago

I’m wearing my late grandfather’s jacket, who sits in the Porsche.

– 2018 911 GT2 RS [Porsche Car Configurator – first posted 13 February 2018]

However, my grandmother wasn’t a fan of German cars due to their wartime experience and feelings of betrayal. Yet they both spoke fluent German.

Instead Freddy drove a yellow Jaguar that I travelled in a lot, especially up to Mount Buller.

Once at the base of Buller we would ascend in a late 70’s Landcruiser that he kept at the bottom of the mountain.

No Porsche back then could’ve done that, but I’d still drive a GT2 RS in a second, haha.

But I’d have to watch that the speed wouldn’t snowball.

alike:

Bi

✓ 1 year ago

Backpack Testimonial

I bought my Aiking Australia daypack sometime in 1994 for around AUD$200 after a hiking teacher at Timbertop spoke so highly of the brand at the end of 1993.

But at Timbertop, my pack wasn’t Aiking. It still exists today and was what my brother used previous to me – a full-size hiking backpack.

Interestingly, Aiking (now One Planet) have supplied the school ever since. I used the pack as my school bag in 1995 and 1996, and also for uni – it has never failed me. It is neither too large, nor too small and I can even use a larger pack on my back and then have this on my front if need be. It is going in for its second repair, and it needed one in around 2000. It has brutally strong canvas and has an extended oversize YKK zip around the perimeter. All the inner seams are still fully intact. The black cordura base is also in top condition. This pack has been so dependable, I have almost taken it for granted, but not so much that I throw it around. Perhaps one day it can be reissued, and like the old Gibson guitars that have their fadings, stains and wear marks recreated – perhaps this pack can also have its patina recreated so that everyone can experience its good looks and high build quality. It is getting a wash at this point, yet I doubt it’ll lose its soul glow.

Well done to the One Planet team.


✓ 1 year ago