Through the Looking Glass

It's amazing how sexy & dynamic the clinical tedium of recording looks when rendered in gorgeous, smoky cyanotype.



It's also amazing how totally unaware I was that my band look like a bunch of fidgety, unshaven chain-smokers. Or that I look uncannily like Dez Cadena circa 1983.

Anyway, for those of you who happen to be in Japan this coming March & April, we'll be touring behind the split single featured above. Come check out one of the shows. You shan't be disappointed.

Meanwhile, on the Far-Eastern front of the class war...

A Lamborghini, two Mercedes Benz, and eight Ferraris were involved in a high-speed pile-up on a rural highway in Yamaguchi prefecture, totaling the cars and sending ten people to the hospital.

Good.

Another Other

Today, walking home across western Tokyo, I strode past a pentagenarian Japanese man who was speaking heatedly with his elder friend on a quiet residential corner when suddenly, the man wheeled around, pointed at me and began barking, "Jew! Jew! Jew!"

This took me aback, not only because I've neither seen nor heard of such open antisemitism in Japan, but especially because I'm not Jewish.

What a schmuck.

Post-Alarm Call

In this world, the one thing that's never in short supply is outrage. An endless parade of idiocy & atrocity is never further away than your TV set, and is sometimes as close as outside your window. This is honestly among the reasons for my recent "sabbatical": between the Libyan civil war; the ongoing atrocities in Syria; the latest terrorist attack in Mogadishu; fresh unrest in Egypt; the Monsoon-induced flooding that has claimed hundreds of lives in Pakistan, Thailand, and Vietnam; the ascension of the latest feckless whipping-boy to the Japanese Prime Minister's seat; Rick Perry's impression of a yo-yo; and, I dunno, Beyoncé plagiarizing avant-garde European choreography, I was stricken by total outrage-option-paralysis. So many things to be angry about, so little time!

In context of the true horrors listed above, that the theatrical reaction to Steve Jobs' death finally drew me back to my keyboard proves it's always the little straws that break the camel's back. I find some small comfort in knowing that I'm not alone.

But between every shiny, bloody distraction, it's too easy to forget that in much of the world, the dull struggle of daily life is still a struggle. Yesterday marked the seven-month anniversary of the March 11 disaster here in Japan. Months may as well be millennia in the 24-hour hypecycle, so even the domestic Japanese media has turned their attention away from those still stricken in Tohoku, as Takao Yamada angrily noted in the Mainichi on Monday:

Of utmost urgency now are the evacuation of children, decontamination, and the installation of becquerel monitors to measure radiation levels in food. But meanwhile, in Tokyo, we're talking about economic growth and the export of nuclear technology, as if what's going on in Fukushima is somehow irrelevant to us. That, I believe, is simply wrong.

To that end, I'm currently attempting to assemble a short radio documentary about the recovery effort in Tohoku.

This is where I need your help.

Since I'm pitching the documentary to a Canadian broadcaster, the piece needs to focus on Canadian citizens who live & work in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures - those places hardest hit by the catastrophe. I want to focus not only on the disaster itself, but also its long-term & still-felt effects, the reconstruction & return to something like "normality", and governmental response to the disaster. That last notion could be, I think, the most instructive on how to proceed in Tohoku and future crises: not only are the Japanese generally dissatisfied with how their own government has reacted, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that Canadian citizens felt more or less abandoned by their own government during a moment of desperate need. It's easy to see why, given that the bulk of the Canadian government's support to Japan was not monetary, or even military, but "moral".

So far, though, I've had little luck in finding anyone willing to speak about their experiences. If any of you reading this, through however many degrees of separation, know a Canuck in northern Japan who might be interested in sharing their experiences, please have them contact me by the e-mail address in the upper-right of this blog (under my profile pic). I'd be most grateful for their conversation.

In the meantime, it warrants mention that a friend & I organized a noise-improv gig back in March to benefit friends of ours up north. A recording of that show is available as a paid download, with all proceeds continuing to Red Cross Japan & other local charities involved in the recovery effort. As an album, it doesn't make for particularly easy listening, but these days, very little in Japan comes easily.

Everything Back To Norbal

The jaunt to Hokkaido was a pleasant vacation from the past month's mild panic & lingering paranoia. I'd visited the northern isle a few years before, so it wasn't totally unfamiliar territory - just different enough to unclutter the brainspace a bit. I gave myself a few extra days before my band's tour kicked off, so I got to enjoy Hokkaido's panoply of vaguely odd pleasures unhindered by driving schedules or sound-checks. A few old favourites were revisited - the Otaru Music Box Museum, Sapporo's Ramen Alley - but the highlights were stumbled-on surprises that, with the exception of bathing macaques, were of a distinctly unoriental nature: Japan's oldest concrete utility pole and the Lucky Pierrot burger chain! With its Edwardian-cum-Old West sideshow decor and demented half-blind mascot, Lucky Pierrot looks like a frighteningly dodgy proposition - a gastronomic Don Quixote. But I'll be damned if those weren't some of the tastiest, tongue-titillating burgers I've ever had, and for half the price of the mediocre, modestly-sized grub you get in Tokyo.

One burger joint I'd conversely advise against patronizing under any circumstances is Sapporo's Crazy Burger, not the least for its dull dentist-clinic decor. Their menu challenges customers with the 恐怖バーガー (literally "terrible burger") which, by the menu description, is only made daunting by a fish paddy and some extra jalapeño peppers. Accepting their culinary dare, I forked over ¥800 (around $10) only to be told they were out of buns and condiments and so was served two thumb-sized cuts of raw fish, and not just any ol' ichthyoid: Surströmming, officially the most foul-tasting food on earth. I discovered this only after having shoved both measly slices into my mouth. The taste was something like a beached whale carcass covered in cat piss. Or maybe sewer-snake braised in battery acid. I'm not sure. The shock to my digestive track was so rude that my whole physiology forbade the very notion of further ingesting anything more solid than air. My appetite had been raped. I'm just vaguely impressed I didn't vomit.

Much of the conversation on tour - as everywhere else - centered around the triple calamity of March 11. In Hokkaido, the effect has been almost entirely abstract. The tsunami that hit its coast was little more than a large wave. Also, the island operates upon a separate power grid; the dimming of neon facades has been out of solidarity as opposed to necessity. The only tangible impact has been the scarcity of certain items - specifically certain cigarette brands & Heineken beer - thanks to interrupted supply lines.

I suppose much the same is true back in Tokyo. Searching for evidence of the disaster, the devil is only found in the details: certain items are still rationed in supermarkets, gas prices are hiked, and commuter train schedules are bedeviled by rolling blackouts in certain suburbs. But then, if every daily trivium is touched by the catastrophe, that's not exactly an unperturbed normality, is it?

A fair number of those expats who fled during the madness of mid-March have quietly returned. The psychosocial schism isn't nearly as dramatic as, say, the Hollywood blacklisted versus the HUAC informers, but there's still some strain between those who stayed put and those who split. My post criticizing the "byejin" or "flyjin" who left the country ripped open an especially ugly fault-line in our immediate social circle. For my part, I've refused to ask anyone to take sides in the argument, but given the communicative embargo my "nemesis" has imposed against me, it unfortunately looks as though mutual friends will have to orchestrate engagements rather shrewdly to keep us apart.

It's interesting that another friend & I, who've been the most vocal in our censure of fleeing foreigners, are also the most explicitly socialist within our clique. Because of our politics, we likely see the disaster as an ideal situation to reconstitute the social framework of Japan. Never before has there been such an opportunity to forge lasting cooperation & compassion between the native population and the expat community. For all the times we've lamented the insular homogeneity of Japan, this is the moment when solidarity amongst Japanese & gaijin can transform the country into a more inclusive, diverse, and fluidly-identified culture. It's to our dismay & detriment that, instead, the hysteria & self-regard of many expats has pitched them in stark, unflattering contrast to the stoic endurance of the Japanese.

Inner Ear Balance

Earth Hour - a token gesture at best - doesn't mean much in a country rolled over by blackouts. Having lost 20% of its capacity, TEPCO is running dangerously near its maximum output and has asked for the public to curtail its electricity consumption. For their part, the Japanese have dutifully & promptly complied: tights belts are the new black. This new trend of collective restraint is the upside of that hive-mind passivity that recently emptied supermarket shelves and often drives type-A expats off their hinge.

I personally suspect the electricity deficit could be addressed merely by shutting down all the damned pachinko parlours. But otherwise, the obvious first sacrifice is Tokyo's famous forest of neon signs. A week ago, my band drove the width of the city coming back from a gig, and from the Edo river through to Shinjuku, Tokyo was a literal shadow of its former self. Friday nights are usually a parade of packed taxis jamming streets lined with sloppy drunks under a technicolour canopy; instead, we sped through a chaioscuro landscape haunted by the odd straggler searching for cabs that were all idling outside dimmed train stations. The hostile loneliness reminded me of the grim, grimy New York immortalized in After Hours or Night On Earth.

(Lest I be accused of bathos, let me refine the above description: Tokyo now looks less like Blade Runner on MDMA and more like... well, just any other city on the planet.)

Having shaken off the initial shock, we're starting to understand the medium- and long-term consequences of the disaster: the global consumer economy has been gut-punched by the disruption of Japanese manufacturing, and imports & exports will be unsteady until the Daiichi plant is solidly entombed in cement. Both of the above have direct consequences for those of us in Japan physically unscathed by the catastrophe: no beer and no new iPhone! The horror... the horror...

But this is where my general pessimism pays off. Should the patina of modern convenience completely peel and flake away, I'm ready. I've been anticipating the day when the lights go out and supermarket shelves are stripped bare since I first saw Mad Max. No tears or rending of garments from me, 'cuz son, it's go-time!

I want to be clear about the cut between pessimism & cynicism. I haven't spent my adult life glumly awaiting Armageddon because it's all fucked anyway - that is the joyless slouch of the cynic. My pessimism sits somewhere between Shöpenhauer's and Nouriel Roubini's: those of us lucky enough to inhabit the best possible part of this worst-possible world ought to enjoy it because it's too good to last forever. Every time I set out across this city, I'm filled with a marvelous hilarity. Should I ever have grandkids, how will possibly describe the lunatic animation of this place to them?

During the drive home with my bandmates last week, we had an amusing epiphany. Our singer had titled two songs - both written last year - "Plutonium" and "Atomic Age", the latter of which contains the couplet "I don't wanna meltdown/But this is really happening." Barely two years into his career as a language-mangling frontman and he's already giving Mark E. Smith a run for his money as rock's preeminent psychic. The drummer immediately demanded the singer start writing some happier goddamned songs before he kills us all.

It's been good to get back to gigging. Aside from restoring a sense of regular purpose, it kills the solitary paranoia of disaster to see friends and swap where-were-you-when stories. Next week, we're off to Hokkaido for a run of shows across Japan's northernmost isle. Nothing like a short vacation from the capitol to clean off the cold sweat & fear-spun cobwebs of the past three weeks.

But now another potential casualty of the disaster could be Japan's live music circuit. Not only have dozens of foreign acts (who bring in the big money) canceled their Japanese tours, but rolling blackouts pose a clear danger to the functional existence of many venues. In the interest of keeping the ecosystem healthy, we're overloading our live schedule. By playing the same city three times in two weeks, sure, we may split our audience for any given show three ways, but better to draw one-third of our audience each to three different venues than pack one club while leaving two others to languish.



This past Monday, I played an improv gig with Uozu, guitarist for hardcore abstractionists (and my favourite band in Japan) Z. This was only our second excursion into quadramplified chaos under the clunky moniker UOZEB, and though it was a hell of a lot of fun, I couldn't hear myself play a damned note all evening. This may have been because we were augmented by a guest drummer & violinist (who ran through more effects pedals than I did). Bedlam at 120 decibels, but all for a good cause: I recorded the show, and as soon as it's mastered, it'll be available as a paid download with all proceeds going towards the Tohoku relief effort. I'll have it all linked up here as soon as possible.

See you on the other side of next week, and meanwhile - stay outta Hong Kong.

The Drift

If Japanese streets are emptier than usual, it's more likely because of the sodden weather than fears of irradiation. Cabin-feverish though we may be, today's national holiday couldn't be better timed. Those of us lucky enough to live outside of eastern Tohoku are depeleted from a week of incessant dread - a hangover minus the happy hedonism that usually precedes the headache.

By now, the excesses of mass-media Cassandras appear obvious even to audiences abroad. The irascible Charlie Brooker did a marvelously caustic take-down of last week's sensationalism. Confessing to some cognitive dissonance from the barrage of conflicting analysis & reportage, Brooker succinctly nailed why all anchors & analysts ought to be taken with a metric ton of salt:

Like most of us, I've no idea whether the fear is exaggerated or not. All I know is that I'm having advanced atomic theory explained to me by people who, last week, were struggling to describe the colour of Kate Middleton's dress.

The chief concern remains assisting the stricken in Tohoku, but throughout the rest of the country, life has largely picked up where it left off ten days ago. From where I sit in central Tokyo, the most immediate threat to my well-being is the precipitous rise in coffee prices.

And so Japan has fallen below the fold. Fair enough that the eyes of the world have drifted elsewhere. Sectarian violence continues in Côte D'Ivoire, the West continues its feeble bet-hedging regarding the democratic uprising in Bahrain, and then of course there's that other oil-rich autocracy descending into blood-swamp anarchy: Libya. Having been a second-banana boogieman for forty years, Qaddafi is finally the world's top-billed despot. If the wanton slaughter of his own citizens wasn't enough to turn news network talking heads, then NATO nations' swift assault on Libya guarantees round-the-clock coverage. After all, when was the last time the French took the lead militarily? That itself is news-worthy.

The speed with which France attacked Libya while fleeing Japan seems paradoxical, but it's all part of Sarkozy's renewed effort to appear authoritative in the run-up to next year's election. Sarkozy's credibility hinges upon his actions in Libya: not only was Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie forced to resign after vocally supporting the since-deposed Tunisian regime, Qaddafi's son is now claiming to have contributed to Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign.

Furthermore, the French government was "stung by criticism they were slow to react to the crises in Egypt and Tunisia." Not only did this ensure military dick-swinging that would be lauded as bold & assertive, it explains why French citizens were the first to be evacuated from Japan following the hydra-headed disasters of March 11. Sarkozy could afford to be ambivalent towards the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt, but he would not survive being perceived as indifferent to French citizens caught in one of the greatest natural disasters in recorded history. However, now the evacuation seems premature and even the aerial assault upon Libya has been called "impromptu." Instead of swift-thinking and determined, Sarkozy risks appearing like (in The Economist's words) he is "policymaking by impulse and improvisation."

Meanwhile, as the newshounds sniff out new scents, a different kind of drift may be occurring in Japan: intercultural estrangement. This is arguably the first Japanese disaster with international consequences since the Second World War, a side-effect of which will be a warp in Japanese-foreigner relations. As countless others and I have noted many times, Japan is arguably the most homogeneous & xenophobic of developed nations (which is really saying something). As such, it's a delicate high-wire act for both Japanese and foreigners to engage each other's culture without retreating to unflattering stereotypes. The foreign community simply isn't large enough to stake its own turf unapologetically, and the Japanese have to tolerate - however grudgingly - those among them who are different.

So it does neither side much good when foreigners collectively lose their cool and stampede the exits like laggard rats. The libidinous pessimism of western media has been perhaps the biggest push out of Japan:

The heightened sense of fear may be due to foreigners consuming an "unfiltered diet" of panic-stricken Western news and worries that the domestic news isn't trustworthy.

Unfortunately, this media-spawned panic spreads virally from foreigners to the Japanese too. After all, when 3,000 Chinese from Tohoku alone have gone home, and the embassies of Japan's major allies - France, Germany, and America - are all encouraging their citizens to evacuate, of course the Japanese are going to wonder what decisive information foreigners are privy to that they're not. Widespread mistrust of the government's candor has persisted since they took several hours to issue a statement after the first explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leaving a vacuum the collective imagination filled with all manner of apocalyptic fantasy.

One of my Japanese bandmates told me tonight that I've become the canary-in-the-coal-mine for our circle of friends. During the peak of last week's confusion, he received a phone call from a friend outside of Tokyo:

"You're alright? Is your girlfriend okay?"
"Yeah, we're both fine."
"And Kentaro? Satoshi?"
"Yeah, they're fine too."
"What about Seb? Is Seb still in Tokyo?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Whew! Well, then, we've got nothing to worry about!"

It's nice to know that I'm thought of as a solid judge of circumstance. But the quickly-decamping foreigner has fast become such a stereotype that it's earned its own ignominious bilingual nickname: the "bye-jin". Clearly, the expat community suffers a considerable deficit in credibility. Ergo, another friend has wisely made his cataclysmal barometer a group of old ladies at his local community center - all with long memories and life experience to match. Once they begin to get rattled, it might be time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

But for now, abandoning a country in its darkest hour does not leave much in the way of goodwill. I wonder how little those that have left really have invested in their lives here, and I can't imagine their Japanese friends will be terribly impressed with their fitful selfishness. If actions speak louder than words, then the point at which someone tucks tail and runs speaks with a megawatt bullhorn. The one possible benefit is that those of us who've stuck it, who've neither headed home nor even withdrawn to some western Honshu hotel, could earn some extra respect from the locals for our solidarity & stoicism.

Who knows. Depending on how this whole episode finishes, our stoicism might very well end up being stupidity & sloth.

Situation Normal, Albeit Fatigued & Uncanny

The mouse-click marathon through a dozen different news sites is now as essential to our rise-'n'-shine ritual as the first cup of coffee. "Welcome to day eight of our live coverage," the BBC live feed greeted me yesterday. Wow, already a week? It feels more like an impossibly protracted bad day. Imagine how long it feels to the folks up north.

Given the tenuous & mercurial situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, we're all but enslaved ourselves to the news cycle. By the time we've checked our various e-mail accounts, friends' blogs, live streams, and embassy websites, it's time to recommence the rotation - after all, something might have changed in the past four minutes! But a snake can only swallow its tail so far before it wants to vomit. The cost of constant connectivity is ceaseless stress. This paranoia has prompted a mass exodus of foreigners fleeing Tokyo for Kansai and Kyushu - which strikes me as an ill-advised strategy. Not only are hotels out west packed like sardine tins, but what will happen if (god forbid) a major aftershock strikes the other side of the country? The ensuing panic & local strain upon resources would be double what it would otherwise be.

We've already seen how quickly support systems can be stretched to the breaking point by a shell-shocked populace. The above photo, snapped this past Tuesday by my friend Lee, captured a sight common to every convenience store & supermarket in the Tokyo metropolitan region. Everyone now has their pet story of some asshole panic-buying. I saw two young women march out of my local mini-mart with eight loaves of white bread and a half-dozen boxes of Frosted Flakes. A day later, a friend witnessed a single woman lugging 15 kilos of rice through checkout. My neighbour Jonny watched one man sweep a whole shelf clean of tofu, and later saw a couple wipe another store out of their entire supply of diapers. (Maybe all that Wonderbread was giving them the sugar-shits?)

Selfish shoppers, however, have marked the nadir of post-catastrophe panic in Japan. Many an overseas commentator has noted the lack of looting, rioting, or other such bedlam that typically rides disaster's coattails. Explanations for the near-undisturbed order of Japanese society have tended to note the culture's homogeneity, immense pride, and innate collectivism. (There's also the ubiquity of authority figures, both legal and, er, other.) But Jonny feels these interpretations ignore the taciturn unease that can be felt around the city: "This feels more like resignation than stiff-upper-lip stoicism to me." This would explain all the panic-buying minus the panic; it does feel as though we've surrendered to the dull inevitability of the worst-case scenario and are merely acting accordingly.

For sure, Japan has suffered a miscellany of worst-case scenarios over the past century. The relative calm of the Japanese amidst misadventure may be part Pavlovian, part harrowed familiarity, but it certainly doesn't stem from an abiding faith in state power. Mistrust of the government has clearly crested when even MTV is accusing Prime Minister Kan of diffidence. Emperor Akihito's five-day-late* televised address provided the perfect analogy to the country's administrative & corporate leaders: in a suit more rumpled than Japan's topography sat an aged man, shielded by privilege and power, with a prehistoric grasp of P.R. offering platitudes instead of strategic substance.



There's certainly panic to be found if you're looking for it - just not amongst the Japanese. Thousands of foreigners have either fled westward or are seeking safe passage out of the country. On Tuesday, the French were the first to loudly shit themselves by calling for their citizens to evacuate; the Germans weren't far behind, spurred by scaremongering news sources like Der Spiegel.

Which brings me to the current bête-noir of every foreign resident: alarmist mass media. To hear it told by the Western media, everyone not yet dead is vomiting blood from radiation poisoning and this airborne death will gradually blanket the globe, crippling mankind and leaving us vulnerable to invasion by Venusians who will kill your grandmother and punch your baby in the face.

By now, every foreigner I know has received a frightened & tearful phone call or e-mail from abroad, pleading with them to leave the country. What else would our families think when every report suggests an outcome of, at best, a cancerous time-bomb, or at worst, "bigger than Chernobyl." Consequently, there's been a massive push-back amongst local bloggers to combat media delerium, emphasizing the relative (and it is relative) normality reappearing across the country. After all, how immediately desperate can the situation be when Japan's already been replaced by Libya, Bahrain, and Côte D'Ivoire for above-the-fold coverage?

Yesterday, my wife & I strode out across Western Tokyo to assess the level of local pandemonium that CNN et al. were reporting.

As you can see, it was utter ataxia, total societal dissolution. Granted, there's an uncanny pall created by the number of still-shuttered shops; electrical shortages have dimmed the neon glare and silenced commercial loudspeakers. But by the most important measures, life continues undaunted.

The most infuriating side-effect of the nuclear neurosis is that it's distracting from the true disaster still unfolding in Tohoku. So displaced is the world's worry that donations are currently a measley sixth of the amount pledged towards the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. Of course, playing up the nuclear problem appeals to the solipsism & self-interest of the West: what happens when/if the radiation hits there? Could a similar catastrophe strike their nuclear facilities? News outlets can't sell ad placements at premium prices while reporting that the Fukushima meltdown is strictly a localized danger. Meanwhile, the American government (and others hoping to avoid Katrina-style embarrassment) is covering its ass by overplaying the urgency of the situation - while nevertheless requiring disaster-stricken American citizens to pay for their own evacuation. Consequently, as opposed to helping the suffering in Tohoku, many in the West are crying narcissistic Chicken Little, weaving the calamity into their own twisted agendas, or retreating into masturbatory navel-gazing.

The bottom line is this: there are 50 selfless workers literally giving their lives to ensure that the nuclear problem remains a limited & local one, while over 10,000 victims remain unaccounted for and 380,000 people have been left homeless. There is little, if any, clean water, fuel, or electricity in Tohoku. These people need help, not impotent hand-wringing.

As for the rest of the country, we're no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop. We've got our lives to get back to, though after a full week of confusion & tragedy, it's nice simply to stop and smell the roses. Or ume blossoms, as the case may be.

* - Interesting trivium: this is also how long it took George W. Bush to reach New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

Shuffle-Play in Dark Days

We're at a bit of a loss for what to do. On the one hand, there's elevated amounts of Godzilla snot floating over Tokyo; on the other hand, the UK's chief science adviser and a moron who once declared war on crows say that it's perfectly safe to be out & about. What's a media-gorged foreign resident to do?

But, happily, our ward is currently exempt from the rolling blackouts, so we've the internet & a handsome record collection to keep ourselves occupied as we fortify ourselves against radioactive intoxicants with spinach (high in iron!) and hard liquor (a.k.a. "The Chernobyl Method").

...Hey, another aftershock! Ain't no party like a tectonic party because, evidently, the party don't fucking stop.

Anyway, in our idle hours under self-imposed house arrest, we've come up with a kind of apocalypse playlist, reproduced below. Each link leads to a YouTube clip, so you can enjoy each song discretely.

And the Earth Died Screaming

1. AC/DC - "You Shook Me All Night Long"
2. Tom Waits - "Misery Is the River of the World"
3. The Fall - "Lay of the Land"
4. David Bowie - "Panic in Detroit"
5. Tricky - "Aftermath"
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "City of Refuge"
7. Talking Heads - "Life During Wartime"
8. Kraftwerk - "Radioactivity"
9. Loop - "Burning World"
10. Black Sabbath - "Into the Void"

Postscriptual Requests
11. James Q. "Spider" Rich - "Yakety Sax"
12. Spacemen 3 - "Things'll Never Be the Same"
13. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Cabin Fever"
14. John Lennon - "Nobody Told Me"
15. The Mothers of Invention - "Any Way the Wind Blows"

Tuesday Morning Theme For Japan's Pacific Coast

I can't tell if I'm being ironic or not.

Pick Up the Pieces

Well, I was about two edits away from completing posts about the ongoing guitar-solo battle and America buttoning up its brownshirt - but given current local circumstances, both those topics seem, if not irrelevant, low-priority.

When the quake hit Friday afternoon, it took me about 20 seconds to realize this was not an average tremor: instead of the normal side-to-side shimmy, the ground was undulating in an unnervingly fluid manner. That it hadn't stopped after 20 seconds was an even worse sign. Not wishing to die pancaked under concrete, I dashed out into the street. I couldn't immediately tell quite how frightened I should've felt: my neighbourhood is populated largely by stoics, slackers, and seniors, all of whom were stolidly standing around watching the streetlights & stop signs rattle and groan. Taxi cabs and bicyclists obstinately struggled to steer straight as the asphalt warped beneath their wheels. Was this a fucking disaster or not?

Once the shaking stopped, I ran back inside to find my apartment totally intact - a minor miracle, considering its seemingly-shoddy construction and our laissez-faire approach to storage. Returning to my computer, I noticed my Caltech scientist friend had just logged on. I broke the news, to which he replied with the appropriate amount of incredulity:

me: Dude, we just had the biggest earthquake I've ever felt.
Scientist Friend: !!!
you ok?
hasn't shown up on my feed yet
me: No, I mean like JUST hit.
Scientist Friend: oh shiiiit

We then spent the better part of an hour swapping links & updates as information began flooding in... 7.9, epicenter near Sendai, 8.8, tsunami warnings, 8.9, the largest earthquake in Japan's history. This was a fucking disaster.

Wow, what an grossly unsuitable turn-of-phrase I just used. "Flooding in..." Less than an hour after the quake, I sat slack-jawed & stupefied watching live coverage of tsunamis bulldozing whole towns along the Pacific coast. There's no point in trying to describe the sight. Not only has the 24-hour news cycle chiseled these images into everyone's retinas, but there's no joy in, uh, eloquently and succinctly relating the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of people.*

Having had my fill of calamity-porn infotainment, I stepped out for some fresh air. The streets were eerily empty for a Friday evening. With mass transportation at a stand-still, everyone was still stuck at work. The signs of catastrophe were quietly obvious, as most shops were either shuttered or sweeping up their shattered wares. (As unpleasant as it is clearing away smashed liquor bottles or ceramics, I can't imagine how exasperating it must be to tidy up a pachinko parlour after an earthquake - ball bearings all over that sumbitch...) A couple of billboards threatened to fall from their perches. The ferroconcrete facade of one shop had collapsed, exposing the building's dainty wood skeleton. But mercifully, Koenji had escaped the quake largely unscathed.

Later Friday night, my wife & I were interviewed by CBC Radio as "eyewitnesses" to the disaster. We were dramatic enough to keep our account interesting, while at the same time emphasizing how little we could justifiably complain. Our misadventure wasn't a pale shade of the terror experienced by residents up north. We were speaking from a heated apartment with hot coffee and clean socks - how bad off could we really be?

Yesterday was a gorgeous blue-sky day with the resiny chill of early spring in the air. A friend & I enjoyed a lengthy hike across Western Tokyo to cure ourselves of cabin fever and the lingering stink of apocalyptic presentiment. However, whatever cheerfulness we'd won during the walk evaporated upon arrival at a friend's house, where we learned that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor had just popped its top. Our immediate course of action was obvious: start drinking like a bastard and pray the jet stream would whisk any & all radioactive toxins up over Siberia, because fuck reindeer, man.

I was spurred to an early retreat home by sudden rumours of rolling blackouts and supply shortages. I must have been slow off the blocks because already there was not a slice of bread, not a carton of milk to be found in any shop I entered. Faced with such a depleted selection, many shoppers had opted for foodstuffs that would strike a penniless college student as grossly unhealthy: boxes of Frosted Flakes, microwave pasta, chocolate-covered potato chips, and enough six-packs to make the U.S. marine corps plotz. I suppose diabetes kills you slower than starvation.

Today, further steps towards normalcy have been made. Electricity, gas, and water are still running. Bread & milk are back on the shelves and the trains are on time. But again, I speak from the privileged position of the resource-greedy capitol almost 400km from the epicenter. The slowly-unfolding horror of nuclear meltdown continues, and the people of Tohoku are in desperate need of assistance. If you're so inclined, donations can be made to the Red Cross and Globalgiving.org. It may seem unlikely that a first-world nation would so be in need, but remember: this is a first-world whose debt is over twice the value of its GDP with a population so aged that it makes the SCOTUS look like spring chickens. If the West still wants someone to manufacture semiconducters and service the American national debt, then help is absolutely necessary.



* - Having neither a television nor the interest, I haven't really watched CNN outside of hotel rooms until this weekend - wow, I had no idea they were such a lousy network. Not "lousy" meaning "transparently propagandist," à la Fox News, just straight-up bad. They've got analytical prowess of a 10-year-old and the emotional tenor of Woody Allen after a bout of heavy drinking. The spectacle will no doubt reach its faked climax Monday night when Anderson Cooper will stroll around the demolished mise-en-scène where the news used to be, feeling the story at us. Ugh.

And I swear, come Monday, if Stewart or Colbert falls back on one goddamned Godzilla joke...

All Shook Up

Well, I'd have a lot more to say about this if there weren't still aftershocks rattling my apartment. Watching live footage of tsunamis wipe whole towns off the map in Miyagi prefecture. Absolutely terrifying. (Roland Emmerich really is a fucking pornographer, isn't he?)

8.8, they're saying - larger than the Great Hanshin Earthquake of '95, one of the largest in recorded Japanese history. Carl, hope all is well down your end of the country.

This planet is bullshit, man.

Suicide Invoice

Given that you can almost set your watch to the latest Wednesday Chuo-line jumper, it's no surprise that Japan marked the sad milestone of 13 straight years of over 30,000 suicides. This infamous statistic has prompted countless studies & strategies, to little (if any) avail. I personally think that being on the bleeding edge of technology - that is, submitting to the coercive power of nonliving objects - is one of the problem's deepest roots. This is also the diagnosis offered by Azusa Hayano, a geologist who volunteers his time to come the hallowed Aokigahara forest for suicides:

Face-to-face communication used to be vital, but now we can live our lives being online all day. However, the truth of the matter is we still need to see each other's faces, read their expressions, so we can fully understand their emotions to coexist.

Of course, weening hoi polloi off their glowing rectangles requires nothing short of societal re-engineering, so more modest means of discouraging self-murder must suffice for starters. If the public can't be coaxed off their iPhones for a little tête-à-tête, they can at least spend more face-time with themselves.

Suicide-prevention mirrors are common sights in underground & enclosed train stations. The idea is that literal reflection becomes figurative, encouraging despondent commuters to take stock and (hopefully) count blessings. A lovely notion, but apparently the mirrors are insufficiently cheering: Japan Rail recently upped the ante by also installing blue LED lights above station platforms to soothe potential suicides.

I think blue lights are as pretty as anything incandescent, but as one Keio University psychologist opined, "If you showed that [curing suicidal behavior with coloured lights] was possible, you would probably win the Nobel Prize." Besides, I think the mirrors' efficacy is given short shrift because of their half-assed implementation; three simple steps are all it would take to make a huge tactical difference. First, make them bigger. Look at the above photo: the mirrors are barely full-length and are at least four meters away. How could someone appreciate their personal worth when they can barely make themselves out in a grimy stainless steel slab across the tracks?

Second: maintenance. As a good friend pointed out, years of wear from inclement weather have started to warp the mirrors into grotesque fun-house distortions, which hardly seems conducive to self-esteem.

Unless perhaps you're also shooting enough smack to finance the Afghan economy.

Finally: product placement. Japanese train stations are festooned from stem to stern with all manner of advertisements. The Shinjuku station Sobu line suicide-prevention mirror is bookended by billboards, one of which seems perennially plastered with a Peach John advertisement. Yes, this Peach John, manufacturer of ladies' ornamental undergarments.

So imagine you're a working stiff in an ill-fitting suit, struggling through the anthill throng of the world's busiest train station after another 60-hour week at a job that breaks new ground in the synthesis of ineptitude, sycophancy, and bureaucracy. Work affords you an apartment the size of the monkey cage in a Victorian zoo, and your social life is limited to binge-drinking in chain restaurants with your androidal co-workers. Squeezed to the precipice of the train platform, your gaze glosses from your rain-streaked steel reflection up & over to this...

The coy, conceited grin of that Venusian ideal that most men well never bed and most women will never resemble. "You can never have me," she seems to whisper through those pixel-brushed lips. Then you hear the hiss & groan of the train approaching at full speed...

This seems distinctly unhelpful.

If I could be, for only an hour...

Well, it's Hallowe'en weekend. If you're a foreigner in Tokyo, this means partying hard on the Yamanote train with a bunch of other white people, though in recent years these impromptu costumed hullabaloos have drawn fire from not only embarrassed foreigners but an increasingly strident hard-right. Personally, I'm not particularly bothered. The Yamanote parties are hardly a utopian T.A.Z. and combating xenophobia doesn't begin by dressing up like Borat and acting like a douche; yet it hardly bears complaining that the train transforms into a mobile drunk tank on October 31 - as opposed to any other night.

Of course, people everywhere concoct all manner of fanciful excuse for the explicit purpose of playing the fool in public. Such saturnalia are exhaust valves for the populace's pent-up frustration & compounded stress, which otherwise might be channeled into some kind of radical political expression - and we certainly can't have that! So when Japanese wag their fingers at an American holiday that is little more than culturally-sanctioned juvenile terrorism, lest they forget they spend summertime getting drunk & playing with explosives.

Really, though, to be content with such intermittent tomfoolery is missing the big picture. Just become a musician. Then you can act like a complete asshole 'round the clock and get paid for it!

Then again, musicians are often as discontent to be themselves as anyone else. (Even moreso in some instances.) This is why the musical masquerade of cover songs is impossible to resist. Yes indeed, it makes good P.R. to associate yourself with an established act, not to mention trumpet your own impeccable taste. But no one's ever kicked out a Jimi Hendrix or Stooges cover who didn't want to be Jimi or Iggy (who also wanted little more than to be their respective heroes). Hell, some bands make entire careers out of hollow impersonations of their idols. As an audience, we owe thanks to those talented few who only unveil their influences occasionally & purposefully.

So instead of the usual ghosts 'n' ghoulies Hallowe'en mix (which you can grab here if you really want), here's an amusing selection of musicians playing at being other people. Click on the mix title to download.

In a Stupid-Ass Way

1. Scott Walker - "Jackie"
2. Tricky - "Lyrics of Fury"
3. Teddy and His Patches - "Suzy Creamcheese"
4. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "I Put a Spell On You"
5. The Fall - "Mr. Pharmacist"
6. The Toreno Brass - "Eleanor Rigby"
7. Sonic Youth - "My New House"
8. The Wooden Glass feat. Billy Wooten - "In the Rain"
9. Melvins - "Going Blind"
10. Dick Hyman - "Green Onions"
11. Shirley Bassey - "Light My Fire"
12. The Chico Magnetic Band - "Crosstown Traffic"
13. La Tia Leonor Y Sus Sobrinos - "Marcha a la Turca"
14. Alex Chilton - "Jumpin' Jack Flash"
15. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Wanted Man"
16. Pavement - "The Classical"
17. Faith No More - "Easy"
18. Martin Denny - "Midnight Cowboy"

Shigeru Miyamoto's Sleeper Cells

Hey, remember "math rock"? That gallingly clinical tag, inescapable in the late-'90s, used to describe any band that studiously avoided regular time signatures? Bands like Don Caballero and Oxes who camouflaged their geeky adoration of finger-sports athletics (e.g. King Crimson, Rush) by wreathing it in spasmic fury?

I don't know if it's just the particular idiom that my band finds itself in, but there seems to be an irrational number of math rock bands in Japan. Now, we're not math rock: all of our songs are in 4/4 or 3/4 and there's not any instrumental breaks that could possibly be confused for a Magma homage. But most of the bands we play with are math rock bands - abrupt tempo shifts, asymmetrical time signatures, technically-demanding guitar runs, etc. This is only odd because math rock's heyday in the west came to a close almost a decade ago, as technical puissance was reclaimed by metal-derived genres and indie kids became more concerned with texture & danceability. Why has math rock refused to fade in Japan?

There are several things that make math rock particularly appealing to guitar-oriented acts in their early-to-mid twenties. The first is its emphasis on technique; unless the intention is keeping it simple-stoopid, there's a genuine satisfaction in mastery of an instrument. The second is that there was significant crossover between math rock and emo; the semi-hysteric emotional mode of many late-teenagers and college kids is attracted to garment-rending catharsis (especially in a country as emotionally muted as Japan). Finally, when bucking musical convention is as easy as dropping an extra beat into a measure, math rock affords the easy illusion of doing something different - even if the genre's decades-old touchstones have become canonical.

Still, something about Japanese math rock doesn't sit well with me. It's a little too crisp in its execution and too rigorously diatonic. The western push towards deconstruction is being countered by some exacting pull from another source - but what? I couldn't tell from whence came this Will To Order until this weekend, when I noticed something curious on another band's merch table: a toy bank in the shape of a Nintendo Famicon.

I've a friend who's the kind of geek that hunts down audio rips of old video game music. The past several times I've been over to his apartment, he's had the Mega Man soundtrack bumping in the background. Given the poxy sonic palette of 8-bit FM synthesis, old-school video game composers such as Koji Kondo used every compositional trick available to create dynamic scores: chromatic counterpoint, syncopation, abrupt tempo shifts, asymmetrical time signatures... hey, wait a minute.

So that's where all these bands picked up their proclivity for epic melodies, Dorian arpeggios, and unnecessary 3-over-2 rhythmic juxtaposition! For every hour spent listening to The Dismemberment Plan, these kids probably spent two sat in front of a video game console. This is the kind of organic synthesis that so many western bands strive for and fail at miserably, coming off instead as so much embarrassing po-mo pastiche. And to think I was dismissing the Japanese bands as stiff, studenty knock-offs of Sunny Day Real Estate - which isn't to say that I like this music any more than I did last week, but at least I'm not baffled by its very existence.

I'll leave you with a couple of concrete examples. Exhibit A is the band we played with in Nagoya on Friday night, the incomprehensibly-named Mudy On The 昨晩.



Exhibit B, the "energy zone" theme from the Nintendo Entertainment System game Contra.



Non-sequitorial postscript: Corporate apologist Eric Harvey takes his "pragmatism" to the big leagues.

Freaks and Fire in Japan's Second City

Funny how stereotypes can be so stubbornly self-sustaining. A few years ago, I showed some friends in Baltimore my favourite Japanese TV show, Gaki No Tsukai. Though most found it hysterical (if mildly disturbing), one friend was actually angry with me. "Y'know," she started, "whenever I say 'my friend lives in Japan,' I spend all this time telling people it's not like you live on Mars, it's not completely batshit insane, not a real-life Blade Runner, the Japanese are just normal cats with some slightly different cultural conditioning - and then you show me this. What the hell am I supposed to think now?"

Similarly, six years ago, almost all I knew of Japan was the lunatic notoriety of the Osaka noise scene. Tokyo was forest of steel & neon, Kyoto was all bamboo & raked pebble gardens, and Osaka was an open-air asylum packed with certifiable nutters who'd swapped bushido for bulldozers & fuzzboxes. Of course, after moving here, I saw how coarse & ignorant this assessment was. Tokyo is an omnivorous hyperreality, Kyoto is more than a historical diorama, and any perceived derangement on the part of Osaka-jin was likely more middle-child contrarianism than a hysteria innate to the city.

But after last weekend's Bakuto festival, I take that last bit back. There really is something in the Kansai water, and Osaka people are off the fuckin' hook. Okay, that's a little unfair: any festival will draw a self-selecting (and thus unrepresentative) multitude. Bakuto is equal parts skate show, dub-head soundclash, tattoo convention, and experimental rock extravaganza - none of which screams "mainstream appeal." But if I threw a loudly-'n'-proudly "countercultural" festival in Tokyo, I'd likely draw as many reactionary nationalists ("Death to post-modern demographics!") as anyone. I certainly couldn't expect the diverse congregation of J-dreads, mori gyaru, baggie skaters, gangsta pseuds, techno-hippies, hardcore punks, fashionistas, greasers, tweakers, pushers, enforcers, Vice mag devotees, expat Williamsburg/Brighton wannabes, aloof chin-strokers, awkward tag-alongs, and unhinged musos that populated Bakuto.

Immediately striking is the festival's setting: a disused shipyard, backdropped by the post-industrial rust & grime of the Suminoeku waterfront. Strolling the docks, it's hard to see whether or not the outside world has indeed crumbled into the yawn of the apocalypse. This dilapidation at once encourages avant-gardistes to bring their convention-smashing A-game, yet makes whatever Neubauten-esque mayhem ensues seem merely appropriate to the environs.

My band was playing the outside stage (next to the skate park) in the mid-afternoon. I spent most of the morning people-watching and wandering wantonly. The earliest bands were all the kind of willfully-amateur, pseudo-tribal dance-punk acts that made Wham City famous, despite how dull & gimmicky they are. Watching a band with the exquisitely dull & gimmicky name Ultrafuckers (ウルトラファッカーズ), a Jared Swilley lookalike was trying way too hard to be really into it while simultaneously stonewalling me, as I depressed his currency as "in-the-know" white guy. Tokenism will only get you laid for so long, dude.

Lunch was a Kafkaesque experience that bordered on sensory breakdown - which had nothing to do with the quality of food. I'd slunk indoors to avoid sunstroke, but the second-floor concourse was sandwiched between competing bass frequencies of obscene volume. From above came the indolent throb of house DJs soundtracking the tattoo convention, while below bands on the Gareki stage vied for sonic supremacy with the incessant thrum of the "Black Chamber" drum-n-bass room. The whole building - windows, walls, ventilation ducts - groaned as several streams of sub swam in and out of phase, coalescing into the same ear-canal-clenching whomp as the Inception score. It sounded... no, it felt like a war zone. Seasick and half-deaf, I stumbled back outside.

Happily, Bakuto delivered that epiphany you always hope for at festivals: when you discover the kind of music you knew someone had to be making but had yet to hear. Kyojin Yueni Dekai (巨人ゆえにデカイ) more-or-less translates as "Because I'm a Giant, I'm Big," which explains why frontman Mizuuchi Yoshihito plays atop stilts, exaggerating his already wiry & mantis-like frame. His guitar has the tinny, equivocal tone of a shamisen or wounded banjo, except for the bass string substituted in the instrument's lower register. The bass string is so roughly detuned that it doesn't so much articulate notes as belch concussively; an atonal gut-punch. Skinsman Wada Shinji alternates between the most minimal of percussive accents and blastbeat freakouts, mirroring Mizuuchi's vocals as he leaps from stony blankness to hoarse bellow. But catharsis is always deferred in favour of suffering the anticipation of the next note; restraint and painfully drawn-out pauses become more tensely theatrical than any punk shitfit abreaction. The effect is like mid-'80s Swans if Gira had been a kabuki student instead of a construction worker.

Unfortunately, two acts that I was especially looking forward to - オシリペンペンズ and オニジャガデルカ - were both playing at the same time as my band. Still, we had a healthy turnout considering we were competing for attention with two giants of the Osaka underground. Hell, I wouldn't even blame someone for skipping our set to go watch the Battle Robots.* Don't get me wrong, I think we're pretty good, but not a lot can compete with remote-controlled scrap-heaps going at it hammer-and-tongs-and-flamethrower.

Some acts were less willing to sacrifice their audience share to automated warriors, and fought fire with fire - literally. Following our set was D.D.S., who performed as a kind of checklist for "subversive" noise rock. Bondage masks? Check. Samples of Hitler? Check. Theremin, circuit bending, turntable abuse? Yep. Gratuitous immolation of old televisions? Of course - but these brainiacs had set the TVs atop a stack of old tires. They deliberately started a tire fire. As plumes of noxious yellow smoke rose into the sky, an ambulance came screaming onto the festival grounds. I suppose the authorities reasonably assumed the sudden expulsion of fumes meant some bad shit was going down.

D.D.S.'s vocalist responded to this incursion by clambering atop the fence and hollering at the EMTs, "Dees eez LOCK AND LOLL!" Couldn't really argue with that, eh?

(*) - That's actually my band in the background of this video clip.

The Cold Hard North

The problem with Osorezan is Mutsu. Poised at the base of the Shimokita-hanto axe-head, it is the gateway to & from the peninsula and, as such, an unavoidable hurdle for anyone who wishes to visit the holy Mount Dread.

Though Mutsu suffers from the same sluggardly pace and surfeit of empty storefronts common to much of northern Japan, it immediately differentiates itself by its North American-style sprawl. Most Japanese cities conform to the global standard of socio-economic topography, wherein wealth & power are concentrated at an urban core and fade the farther they're stretched out towards shoddy suburban estate housing. But Mutsu fits the classic (if inching-towards-obsolescence) North American mold: the decaying husk of a downtown nucleus is ringed by prefab strip malls, car dealerships, and chain restaurants which give it a curiously nostalgic, pre-globalization anonymity. Standing outside the Mutsu train station, surveying the McDonald's, the Exxon service station, the D.I.Y. home furnishing warehouse, this could be Brandon, MB; Decatur, IL; Surrey, BC; anywhere really. Only the garish facade of the pachinko parlor insists on the place's specificity.

Suburban sprawl is only the start of Mutsu's strangeness. At the tourist info office, they handed us glossy-print maps that highlight Mutsu's "nightlife & eatery hotspot" in pink, a colour that in Japan carries connotations far more sinister than girlish innocence. But in a town of barely 60,000 residents, we were sort of stuck for options, so off we went with hopes of finding a foreigner-friendly pub. Sure enough, the "nightlife & eatery hotspot" was solid square kilometer of snack bars, stucco-shedding windowless shoeboxes of iniquity with asphyxiating neon signs that crackled with all the hostility of an electric fence. The only things on the street in fewer numbers than working streetlights were women. Everyone we passed was some leather-necked man in ratty sweatpants.

We eventually found one izakaya with some guileless students stood out front, so it seemed like a safe bet. That didn't stop the young waitstaff inside from being struck speechless by the sight of two foreigners. After a panicked exchange, they hauled the head chef - apparently the only one with any English ability - out from the kitchen to seat us. Once we'd shown that, yes, we did speak some Japanese, the evening proceeded without problem and we enjoyed some grilled chicken before retreating to our hotel.

The next night, I thought steal a few snapshots of this roughneck warren, given that it's the kind of place few foreigners ever visit, even by accident. Except for the photo above, I came away empty-handed. It took little more than two minutes before I realized how obnoxiously I stood out, a lanky John Lennon lookalike armed with a camera in a backwoods red-light district. Gaggles of half-drunk fishermen and farmhands felt silent as I passed, sizing me up and finding me their physical inferior. Nowhere else in Japan have I ever felt such intense, ambient hostility. I remembered how distinctly unwelcome some friends had felt when they'd visited Tokyo's oldest adult-entertainment area. The key differences, however, were that the locals of Yoshiwara are used to seeing foreigners; my friends were traveling as a pair, not alone as I was that night; and they had a pronounced height advantage over any potential adversaries, which I did not. If any belligerent goon wanted to test his mettle by jumping the gaijin, I would've been sausage stuffing. I was one rude gesture away from starring in a Japanese remake of Easy Rider.

Life's Rich Tapestry (Music Edition)

Shimokitazawa is the Williamsburg of Tokyo: a hustle-bustle locus of all things cool & au current that may have been genuinely countercultural a decade ago that is now more populated by tourists & trendspotters than radicals. Why it became a hotspot is a bit baffling: Shimokitazawa stands on the suburban border of the metropolis with nary an arterial road nor marquee metro line to access it. Beyond that, the neighbourhood is a near-unnavigable tangle of tiny streets wherein even the keenest sense of direction chokes in confusion.

At the bottom of a sloping street, in the unmarked basement of a liquor distributor, is Three - arguably the worst live venue in Tokyo. Sure, it's got glossy brutalist decor that screams modernism, and the clientele is tragically hip, but lord does it suck. The PA was set up by someone I wouldn't trust to fine-tune a home stereo: the speaker stacks face inward towards each other at 45º angles, creating a swamp of phase-cancellation that makes every square inch in the room sound different and bad. Then there's the one-meter-diameter column right in the middle of the fucking floor.

But there's something psychically wrong with Three as well. Maybe its low-lying location at the bottom of Shimokitazawa's labyrinth make it a sinkhole for bad voodoo, but whenever my band has played there we've suffered catastrophic, show-stopping technical difficulties. The first time, the bass cabinet blew out and the bridge on my guitar collapsed. A week ago, barely two songs into the set, I broke two strings and the drummer's kick pedal came unscrewed during the same verse. It's enough to make you wanna get medieval on a motherfucker.

The good news is that we've a chance to redeem ourselves tonight at a sightly more upscale venue in Shibuya. The better news is that in a little over a week, we're playing the Bakuto Festival in Osaka. Not only are Osaka audiences as bacchanalian as the Japanese get, the line-up includes some of my favourite bands - Solmania, Oshiri Penpens, OOIOO. A good way to spend a long weekend, indeed. (And I don't even have to do any of the 8-hour drive!)

The best news for the time being, though, is that my latest solo effort, Rogues Gallery, is finally available to you dear people overseas. Six months after its initial release in Japan, the album is now for anyone-from-anywhere to own on cassette. Yes, cassette, but not because I'm capitalizing on Reagan/Thatcher-era nostalgia. I simply ain't got the scratch for a vinyl release right now. But format snobbery aside, it sounds delightfully thick & feral on tape and every copy comes in a handmade cardboard case.

Still need to be convinced of this fine product's artistic worth? Well, you can stream the whole album on Bandcamp and the lead single, "The Bug Man", is available online for free. Lend me your ears and they will be richly rewarded.

Odds 'N' Sods

Just a few non-sequitors strung together to retune my synapses to typing-mode...

An oft-forgotten and neglected stop on the Yamanote beltway is Uguisudani (鴬谷), or "Valley of the Nightengales" - an appropriate name for a labyrinthine pit of iniquity populated largely by ladies of the night. Nestled within the neon smog is a claustrophobic music club called What's Up, a ramshackle dive whose construction-site decor reminded me of Toronto's Bovine Sex Club. I played an improv gig there last night with some friends. The music most often split the difference between post-rock cathartic crescendos and jam-bandy noodling - at least until the last set, when the whole thing went full-tilt-boogie batshit a la Acid Mothers Temple, complete with barefoot vixen writhing around the stage. Mercifully the "key" had become completely unhinged by the time I'd broken two strings and was struggling to play anything other than echoplexed banshee squall.

The return journey from the gig revealed that it was a strange Sunday night all around: a shirtless white man was engaged in a screaming match with several police officers at Ikebukuro station, and as I strode home there were several EMTs scrubbing spots of blood off the sidewalk outside my local station. No other indication as to what had happened.

Meanwhile, the local discount dry-goods-'n'-liquor store has stepped their game up by installing a Muzak system. But instead of golden-age easy listening or chirpy contemporary pop, they've decided that ragtime is the ideal soundtrack to purchasing overstock pasta and almost-expired yogurt. The juxtaposition between jaunty Scott Joplin tunes and the defeated ennui of the staff is cartoonishly tragicomic.

Finally, during our jaunt around northern Japan, my wife & I suddenly began communicating almost exclusively via daft slang. We're fairly fond of odd turns of phrase (e.g. "gong show" for a chaotic or unfortunate event) but it was a little strange to find ourselves quoting Gucci Mane or Dizzy Rascal ("Blüd! Kin ya heeya them sah-rens coomin?") on an hourly basis. Perhaps all that sulfur at Osorezan strangled our grey matter a bit.