Souvenir Part 1: How Nerds Make Enemies

About a month ago, I sat in front of a blank form e-mail in which I was to list my top three tunes of 2009 to submit to the Dandelion Radio Festive Fifty. Three songs. This took over forty minutes and two cups of coffee, but not because it took that long to painstakingly weigh my options; because I couldn't think of three songs worthy of ornamenting a whole year. In the end, I opted for Mos Def's "Auditorium", Pissed Jeans' "False Jesii Part 2", and the Flaming Lips' "Convinced of the Hex" - marvelous songs all, but not especially surprising or brain-expanding.

At any rate, this exercise made it clear I was in no position to write the usual year-end poll. Writers more erudite & curious than myself were reduced to balancing their top 25 lists between hipster-bait and inexcusable trash like the Black Eyed Peas - how the hell could I salvage even a dozen decent tunes from such a desolate musical landscape? Yet what music writer can resist the allure of lists? Mercifully, we'd come to the end of a decade (a milestone which almost escaped me entirely), always a decent (if arbitrary) time to take stock. But I didn't want to fall prey to the backwards-looking pattern which Simon Reynolds has noticed, nor exaggerate my crankier tendencies by echoing Glenn Branca's recent Jeremiad. Instead, I thought I'd take a look at the albums I listened to, not liked, the most over the course of the Aughts.

2000:
Fantômas, Fantômas (a.k.a. Amenaza Al Mundo)
Mr. Bungle, Disco Volante

A decade earlier, I'd been inspired to pick up the guitar in emulation of a kid six years older and many degrees cooler than me; a kid who worshiped the ground on which James Hetfield, Slash, and (whoops) Nuno Bettencourt walked. Consequently, I was the first kid in my elementary school to own Appetite For Destruction and Master of Puppets. By my last year in high school, I still hadn't suffocated my inner metalhead, though having come of age in the "grunge era" had moved me away from sweep-picking & double-kick-drums towards the thunderous sludge of the Melvins.

But my musical world had been shifted seismically by the purchase, out of sheer curiosity, of Frank Zappa's Apostrophe (') on my thirteenth birthday. It defied every rule that Top 40 radio had imposed on my impressionable mind: it was virtuosic but hilarious, it was orchestral but whimsical, it was psychedelic but cynical. Most importantly, it took the piss out of everything terrifying to the young adolescent - religion, sex, love, and bodily dysfunction.

As Tom Waits once said, you can't un-ring a bell. I was forever changed, much to the chagrin of those around me as my mission became to musically mind-fuck everyone in earshot. I forced my first band to cover "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" and would blast the Boredoms' Pop Tatari in the student lounge at school. Then, sometime when I was fifteen, my friend Ben bequeathed most of his cassettes to me before he was shipped off to boarding school. Sorting through the bag, I pulled out a tape on which a puke-green clown grinned ominously at a single lit match. Ben immediately said he was happy to be rid of that particular album and warned me against listening to it. "Imagine dudes who could've gone to Julliard figuring out how to make the scariest music possible," Ben said. "That shit will give you nightmares."

Of course, I threw it on my boombox as I bedded down that night. I ended up listening to all 73 minutes three times and went to school sleepless the next day. This was what I had been searching for, this was the band that I knew had to exist yet had so far been unable to find. Everything I loved about music was contained therein: technical pyrotechnics, whiplash genre-jumping, the funhouse dementia of Danny Elfman's early movie scores, the obsidian evil of the meanest metal riffs, and even the juvenile scatology of those Ween records my friends kept lending me, all wrapped up in circus bunting and bondage masks. This was it.

I spent the next three years amassing every album with any Bungle band member's name on it - Trey Spruance's "solo" outings as Secret Chiefs 3, Trevor Dunn's avant-jazz releases on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and of course the small-but-swelling Ipecac Records catalogue. Ipecac was (and is) the label Mike Patton started to release the projects his Warner Bros. bosses wouldn't touch, the first of which was the inaugural effort by Fantômas, Patton's metal "supergroup" featuring members of Slayer & the Melvins.

By now, Disco Volante had secured its spot as my favourite Bungle record. Its compositional density appealed to my (ahem) maturing ears, and I found its messy experimentalism more intriguing than Mr. Bungle's fussy "pop" swan song, California. But with the exception of the terrifying "Carry Stress In the Jaw", nothing on Disco Volante really "rocked." Though I was still possessed by the urge to throw devil-horns and headbang, I'd become self-conscious enough to lack the conviction required to be a true metalhead. As much as I privately loved "Walk" or "Raining Blood", I found such teeth-gritting machismo, well, ridiculous. I was also sick of getting kicked in the head at live shows.

Enter Fantômas. For kid who liked Marc Ribot and Ministry in equal measure, that album pushed all the right buttons. Gut-rumbling low-end? Check. Pummeling palm-muted riffs? Yep. Gatling gun drum rolls? You bet. Sudden left-turns and defeated expectations? By the bushel. Cartoonish shrieks and sound effects? And how!



It was only later that I realized the extent to which I'd forever be at odds with The Hip because of my fandom for, specifically, Zappa and Patton. The former's modernist & satirical tendencies have somehow left him tarred as "nerdy shit" that is "not expressive", and the latter is one of the most universally reviled performers still alive for reasons I've yet to hear satisfactorily explained.

Who knows. Maybe it's because back in high school, some prick kept blasting "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast" or "Desert Search For Techno Allah" in the student lounge.

Next: Punk & pigfuck enter the picture.

Hype & Polemic

Friends, nomads, no-country-for-old-men... do you suffer from ragged nerves? Sleepless nights? A gaseous suspicion of & contempt for your fellow man? In need of a psychic balm that just burns away the tattered fringes of your damaged psyche? Then may I present to you... The Vandelles.

Yeah, so they rock the same black rebel motorcycle schtick that was already second-hand by the time the Reid Bros. got ahold of it. But hey, it's an act we all enjoy and who these days couldn't use a little high-volume, tweeter-shredding treble to wipe their mental slate clean? As an unlikely bonus, the Vandelles actually have good tunes to back up their black-leather-'n'-Fenders mean-mugging. Double bonus: no stupid goddamn haircuts!

Hang on a minute: since when do I, Monsieur Nouveau Modernisme Deluxe, get off plugging retro rock 'n' roll acts? Since today's release of the Vandelles eponymous EP makes them my labelmates on SVC Records, and the more of you that buy the EP, the more SVC can lay out on my own upcoming LP. Ha! Seriously, though, anyone with the internet access to visit the SVC online store can absolutely afford the couple o' quid that the EP costs. If you just can't be bothered to support the dreams of creative twentysomethings, then for god's sake don't blow the cash on another pack of smokes or beer: send it to the Red Cross, you selfish bastards.

So whaddaya think? Did I miss my calling as an ad man? Could I sell sand to a camel or London Bridge to a Yank? Hell no. The fact is my job as a "commercial music composer" is the only one from which I been fired, and I slunk out of the (ahem) formal music press when I suspected I was just a poorly paid hack boosting redundant tripe. Which makes it all the more bemusing that I've started getting review requests from PR people pushing lo-fi folk Johnny-Come-Latelys or whatever. It's at least encouraging insofar that this means someone out there actually reads this damned blog and feels my voice is worth including in the conversation. But still, wow - I have a readership? Flabbergasting!

Similarly, I received an e-mail the other day that not only declared that the writer was a "big fan" (!) but I'd "inspired" him to start his own cult-crit blog, Spots Before the Eyes. Apparently, my quasi-qualified rants have helped his thinking regarding some of the perennial quandaries facing the post-millenial music fan, including (these are quoted directly from the e-mail):

Why don't I like today's Pitchfork music?

This query raises questions of its own: has the web's leading music journal crafted so well-sculpted a niche for itself that "Pitchfork music" is now a recognizable genre? Not quite. I can't think of a single band that encompasses everything the Forkers throw their critical heft behind. To its credit, Pitchfork still casts a reasonably wide stylistic net; on Friday, its reviews covered alt-country, orchestral pop, and black metal acts. That being said, there's a handful of aesthetic & performative tricks that Pitchfork falls for every time, recognizable enough that you could bet money on what rating an artist will receive and walk away with a heavier wallet. Was anyone surprised that the new Vampire Weekend album - a year after the backlash and boasting a newly-earned confidence - received an 8.6 and the "Best New Music" imprimatur? Or that Animal Collective shat out another hippy-dippy bleepfest and garnered a perfect 10? On the other hand, if Mike Patton's next project earns above a 6, or if the Dum Dum Girls' debut full-length earns anything below a 7.8, I'll eat my shoe.

Why aren't I familiar with any of the songs performed on American Idol?

The easy answer, of course, is that they're not worth knowing! But this touches on the diasporic effect digital culture has had. Christopher Weingarten hit the nail on the head, speaking at a Twitter conference last year:

If you read Spin or Rolling Stone in '96, you'd get an article on Nine Inch Nails, an article on the Chemical Brothers, an article on Snoop Dogg, and the internet doesn't work that way. ...It's harder to get exposed to things that aren't in your comfort zone. I have friends that are so deep into indie-rock they don't know what the fuck Katy Perry is, or Lady Gaga. ...I can always learn about stuff that's important to me, that's easy. I wanna learn about stuff that isn't important to me.

Because the internet allows users to custom-tailor the information they receive, it's frighteningly easy to block out anything that isn't a known & comfortable fit - and this goes for political opinions and even facts, not just music. So unless you actively enjoy & ingest the kind of formulaic power-ballads that appeal to foghorn-throated starlets, there's no good reason for you to have idly heard the shit on American Idol.

Why is so much music criticism so shitty?

Well, whenever you deal with a form that encourages the belligerent expression of personal taste as though it were divine writ, you're going read an ungodly amount of self-indulgent pap. The job pulls more than its fair share of unqualified punters attracted by the glamour & apparent ease of the work. ("I just talk shit about a band and get paid for it, plus backstage passes? All right!") It's an occupational hazard, really.

But the internet has only aggravated the issue. With neither copy editors or column space to rein in the writing, music bloggers & online scribes can ramble for thousands of useless, swampy words. At the other end of the spectrum, that people think a 140-character monologue could possibly count as meaningful journalism is surely the death knell of the form.

But let's not forget that music is overwhelmingly a young person's game, by & for teenagers and twentysomethings. Most music journalists simply haven't had the time to mature as writers. A friend who's been devouring the 33 1/3 book series said that the best-written volume by a nautical mile was the one about Hendrix' Electric Lady Land, by a man old enough to have actually seen Hendrix in concert. This means he has literally a lifetime's more writing experience than your average NME hack. Lord knows the reviews I wrote for the Baltimore City Paper were rather shit - because I was some fatheaded 20-year-old in love with his own wordsmith wankery. Give me another ten years and perhaps I'll have something worth saying.

Whether anyone will be listening, of course, is another question altogether.

As the curtain lifts on 2010...

...it would appear that God's sick, "compounding-interest" sense of humour is still intact.

On the other hand, Jay Reatard's dead. This somehow strikes me as a good omen.

Back Up & Way Out

Well, I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Japan is The Land Of Convenience for anything but the shit that matters. It comforts me to know that, at any hour of day or night, I can purchase Hello Kitty flip-flops, a half-gallon of grain alcohol, and/or a six-pack of ladies undergarnments. But when it comes to something like obtaining antibiotics, transferring currency, or securing internet access... count on more red tape than the binding on that mongoloid bastard of an American healthcare bill.

But, for want of proper content, here's a few minor Christmas miracles:

• Finally, the ISP acknowledged that our apartment building is not an "error" on Google Maps, but a proper building, and so finally got us online.
• The next full-length (yeah, didn't know that was in the works, did ya?) is done - barring, of course, revisions, reconsiderations, and mastering next month. Details to follow.
• And now, I'm fucking off to an east African country with a fuel shortage & political unrest. Happy holidays!

Bandwidth Bandit Sub-Rosa Broadcast

I just moved from one side of the ward to the other, and consequently am again without internet access. (This seems an excessively recurrent condition for someone who lives in a developed nation...) Luckily, we've an indiscreet neighbour who doesn't password-protect their wireless signal, so tenuous & temperamental as it is, we've some means of being online in the meantime. The signal disappears between noon and sometime late in the evening (presumably when unseen neighbour departs to & returns from toil) so I'm having to occupy myself with matters of substance instead of blog-trolling all day.

But my god being off the intergrid relieves the mind of so much clutter. Yesterday, someone tossed me a sentence that included the nouns "American Music Awards", "gay dude", and "shitstorm" and I had no fucking idea he was talking about, yet felt effervescently unburdened for not knowing.

There are a several blog-pieces I'm cooking up behind the curtain for your pre-holiday hivernal entertainment, but they'll obviously be lighter on the links and probably considerably less au current than usual. For now, I offer you a piece of brain-tickling entertainment of a quality I can only hope to one day match: Cory McAbee's 2001 masterwork, The American Astronaut.

What's Mandarin for "Your Band Sucks"?

Via the Daily Swarm, I see that NPR and CNN fashioned boderline-unethically-similar stories about the distending Chinese rock 'n' roll scene. Both articles focus almost exclusively on two bands - Carsick Cars and P.K. 14 - and the polestar of the Beijing live scene, D-22. Though two acts on a brief tour of the American east coast and a sole hotspot hardly recommend a monolithic music scene, that two giants of the narcissistic American mainstream media have decided it's attention-worthy suggests one of two things:

1. It's a quirky, below-the-fold human interest piece that dovetails delightfully with coverage of Obama's pan-Asian jaunt.
2. Rock music has reached critical mass in a nation with a full fifth of the world's population, so it's time we pricked up our ears.

"And why wouldn't it be?" the NPR piece smirks. "China has what seems like the fastest-growing everything else."

Anyone who's heard Carsick Cars' eponymous debut knows immediately why Sonic Youth asked them to open SY's inaugural Chinese tour: Carsick Cars sound like Goo or Dirty, SY at their most rockist & crowd-pleasing, minus any irony or subversion, plus a more pleading, earnest melodicism. Basically, like Death Cab covering "Teenage Riot". Or Bloodthirsty Butchers.

Meanwhile, I looked up P.K. 14 on YouTube - hey, if they can get out of Beijing to tour Chapel Hill & Brooklyn, I knew they wouldn't have been blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Judging by their music videos, while a snug double-bill with Carsick Cars, P.K. 14 are further from their tourmates' post-hardcore squall and closer to the lo-fi amateurism of mid-'90s indie-pop... Sebadoh, Hayden, et cetera ad nauseum.

Which is all well & good, but Mandarin lyrics don't provide the shock of the new as much as the tickle of novelty. An accent isn't enough to build a career on - just ask the Proclaimers, or Men At Work, or Gogol Bordello. Then again, if ever there was a time when western audiences were more willing to gulp back the festering leftovers of yesterday's sounds, I ain't lived through it. There may be hope for a "Mandorock" crossover yet.

There's something deeply disquieting about the very existence of Chinese rock. China - a country that has embraced the most pernicious facets of capitalism without loosening its authoritarian bridle - has incorporated an artform that's ostensibly about rebellion, freedom, and bucking convention into its sociocultural ethos. Not only does this testify to how toothless & co-opted rock music has become, but Chinese rock 'n' roll serves as a "soft power" Trojan horse for the CPC: shucks, they can't be that oppressive and despotic - look, they've got kids in leather jackets with CBGB's patches!

The commodification of rebellion is, obviously, the oldest trick in the book. But back when Columbia Records was courting hippies with corny "They can't bust our music!" sloganeering, regimes in the Eastern Bloc fought tooth & nail to keep the corruptive influence of rock's speaker-blowing hedonia off their doorstep. That the last such regime standing* is showboating its punk rock bands is a noxious con indeed.

My hope is that casual music fans, who could give a fuck about political pandering via sham cultural sycophancy, will be turned off by the second-rate mimicry & six-string minstrelsy of these bands. One of the musicians profiled in the CNN article, "a young Chinese rocker sporting lace-up leather pants and teased out long hair," calls himself Ricky Sixx, fer chrissakes! When will China stop selling the west shoddy, slapdash counterfeits of our own crap back to us?

Photo by Arion

(*) - I'm talking about Cold War-era state-corporatist regimes, now. There are undoubtedly worse rulers to live under these days than Hu Jintao.

Hydrochloric Shaved Weirds

This taxonomy of face fuzz has gotten out of hand - as any good beard does, I suppose. But it's balancing the equation from the wrong side: what do we learn of any recognizable subset by, first, isolating them, second, cherry-picking a shared stylistic flourish, and, third, coming to the conclusion that they're a recognizable subset? This is like scanning promo shots of the '89 Sub Pop roster and feigning surprise that the musicians share a fondness for flannel and ripped denim.

If anything, we should seize upon a certain type of facial topiary, find who sports it across various genres, and then ruminate about what the common thread may be. For instance...

THE WILD MAN

Name: Warren Ellis of the Bad Seeds and the Dirty Three
Genre: Dark Americana; roots rock

Name: Pharaoh Sanders
Genre: Avant-garde jazz

Name: Joe Preston of Thrones and Harvey Milk
Genre: Stoner rock; doom; drone

THE ABE LINCOLN

Name: Mos Def
Genre: Conscious/backpacker hip-hop

Name: Thijs van Leer of Focus
Genre: Prog ne plus ultra

Name: Rjyan Kidwell, a.k.a. CEX
Genre: IDM; glitch-hop; noise

THE CHOPS

Name: Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre
Genre: Psychedelic rock

Name: Sly Stone
Genre: Funk; soul

Name: Glenn Danzig
Genre: Heavy metal; horror punk

THE FU MANCHU

Name: Holger Czukay of Can
Genre: Krautrock; electronic; techno

Name: Nick Cave
Genre: Dark Americana; post punk; gothic folk

Name: Glenn Hughes of The Village People
Genre: Disco

Not that facial hair should be interpreted as anything other than a snapshot of an artist, since it changes & evolves over time. I myself have sported all of the above (except the dreadful Abe Lincoln) at some point over the past year alone; Nick Cave was clean-shaven his whole career until Grinderman debuted three years ago; and Robert Fripp, who currently looks like your asshole Tory-supporting grandfather, once rocked the most righteous afro-and-sideburns combo this side of Sly Stone.

This quicksilver quality is, of course, also applicable to hairdos, as illustrated by both David Bowie's career and the Black Flag Haircut Continuum.

Sojourns in Meatspace

I always wince with a bit of guilt when I look back at this blog and see a scant couple of posts over as many weeks, like some expensive piece of exercise equipment gathering a visible layer of dust in the corner. That is more or less how I treat this site: as a means of streamlining my communicative M.O., of flexing my linguistic muscles, and of occasionally stretching my trains of thought. And just like everyone else's various exercise routines, it's neglected far too often in favour of more "pressing" and "immediate" concerns.

Such excuses are more often than not authentic (though they're excuses nonetheless). Outside of cyberspace, the end of the calendar year is such a Gordian knot of loose ends to be tied before singing "Auld Lang Syne", you'd think I had a legitimate job. Even the friends with whom I spend my cherished downtime ceaselessly needle me about how much I have on my plate:

Are you finished moving? When will the record be done? Have those friends come through town yet? Don't you have practice that day? How much more editing? Do you have an outline yet?

The good news is that it's by & large under control and I predict more-than-satisfactory results, so I'll be able to survey the past year with some satisfaction (in spite of my initial prognosis).

But I'm not entirely sure I can say the same of this blog. Sure, I've contributed a couple of interesting ideas, and I'd like to think I haven't let genuinely shit writing escape into the public sphere, but this site has been relegated to backburner status since I returned to Tokyo. I still enjoy sparring with anonymous antagonists half a world away, and I'll exploit as many outlets for my various projects as possible, but spewing invective online has been at most the third-most-important thing I've done any given day this year.

My banner year in blogging was 2008, when I lived in Hamburg and during which I was the least engaged with my real-world surroundings that I've ever been. This was as much my fault as anything, though that famous Nordische hospitality didn't fucking help. The point is, though, that the number of words I'd type per month exceeded the number of words I'd speak by a factor of perhaps dozens; I'd interact with as many online personas in a single day as flesh-&-blood humans in a week. I was communicating as often, efficiently, and prolifically as ever - the only difference was that I'd moved from meatspace to the electronic aether.

Sorry, did I say "the only difference"? Not quite: I was a goddamn wreck. The further I retreated into my online simulacrum, the more corroded my general mental state became. No matter how extensive the e-mails I'd write or receive, it was no substitute for the sizzle & synchronicity of a good conversation. What I needed was some sustained, resonant harmony among fellow human beings. But my contrary attitude towards my environment made it that much more difficult to engage in the kind of casual conviviality I needed. The horrid Catch-22 of any deleterious, addictive behaviour: the greater the need to be healthy, the harder it is to be so on even a minimal level.

The irony is that, now that I'm back amongst the living, everyone seems to be sinking deeper into the quicksand of cyberspace that I had at my most estranged from reality. Had Twitter been described to me a year ago, I'd have said it was destined to be the Pet Rock or Tamagotchi of Web 2.0, the most self-indulgent of attention-sapping trifles - not the fastest growing social tool on the net, and certainly not Time Magazine's "Person of the Year". Similarly, perhaps the greatest indignation I suffered in Germany was that almost none of my friends bothered to maintain even the most cursory contact. But barely a year later, I take for granted that the most meaningful relay of information I can expect from anyone outside of Tokyo is a Facebook status update. Of course, that I accept the new norm doesn't mean I must do so without bitterness.

I was mulling this over with a friend the other day; he just recently reconnected with the internet after eight-years of online abstinence. Having been without even the slimmest online existence while everyone else expanded their personal brand via MySpace, flickr, Twitter, Blogger, and Facebook, my friend has had to adjust to current cyber-conditions at whiplash pace. Understandably, he's fascinated with how ornate* a "life" somehow external to "reality" can be, and invoked the prophetic words of William S. Burroughs:

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Obviously, Burroughs was thinking more specifically of inner space (of which he considered himself a "cosmonaut"). I doubt ol' Willy B. had enough interest in the objectives of the Apollo missions to have meant outer space, nor do I think he cared enough about computer engineering to have specifcally predicted a communicative network of autonomously-manned machines. But in terms of man's future lying in some ethereal non-space, some subjectively-construed fog free of any realist metrics, Burroughs was absolutely right.

Regrettably, continuing the trend since the first neanderthal spurred sparks from between stones, our technology exceeds our understanding of its potential & power. As thrilled as we are that we can globally broadcast our most menial brainfarts, or watch every imaginable congress of naked people, we don't fully appreciate the danger the internet presents by allowing the from-scratch construction of our own bubble realities. Specifically, we don't appreciate that our online "lives" are pseudorealities predicated upon & filtered by our personal biases, and yet we profess shock, shock! when the bulk of online communication is profane headbutting between bullheaded fusspots who'll never see the other side. We bring our real-world certainty, our empirical surety into the scramble-suited paramnesia of the online "world", in denial that our realist epistemology is inapplicable in such a shape-shifting hallucinoscape.

Reality has always been a hard sell & an even harder purchase, far before the fluidity of the online "world" entered the picture. Most disconcerting is that the internet is the first "netherworld", the first extradimensional space (supplemental to the traditional four dimensions) of which we have direct experience & evidence. For all the talk of tooth fairies & deities, of heaven & hell, of grandparents staring benevolently down from some cloudy resort, no one has even been able proffer a single scrap of evidence thereof. But I know, without doubt or hesitation, that friends with whom I only communicate online exist, since I experience their presence in what can reasonably called a "real" way. Yet, in contemplating these "virtual" friends from my place in the world of bone & blood, I regard them as I regard other friends or family who no longer exist in meatspace: with sadness, with some sense of loss & lack, as "departed" and no longer corporeal. They are phantasmic in a way not dissimilar to the deceased, because their intrusions upon my quotidian existence are equivalently vague, intimated, and memorial. They are not "real" enough.

Or, in the unacademic candor of Mr. Patton Oswalt, "You can replace the Internet with five really smart friends."

(*) - He hesitates, as I do, to use the word "rich".

The Circle of Life

Were you to indulge an interest in poorly-written English-language far eastern news publications and check the Japan Times right now, you'd see the following above-the-fold stories stacked neatly on top of one another:

• Police arrest Ichihashi in Osaka: Tatsuya Ichihashi, the only suspect in the 2007 murder of a British woman, was arrested Tuesday after managing to elude police for 2 1/2 years.
• More body parts of college student are discovered: The torso and part of a thigh bone of a beheaded female college student from Shimane Prefecture have been found on a mountain in Hiroshima Prefecture near the site where her head was found last week, police said Monday.

And the great cosmic Rube Goldberg machine spins & whistles along its merry way! I'll not indulge in the prejudicial speculation about whether or not Ichihashi will be (a) beaten to death with a spiked, LSD-drenched bat because he murdered a foreigner, or (b) slapped across his backside and sent home because he murdered a foreigner. Instead, I'll just remind myself how lucky I am to live in a city that doesn't see an average of 270 of its citizens killed every year, and where my wife can walk home alone at night without a can of mace & six months of aikido lessons under her belt.

Of course, this presents a timely opportunity to examine the strange nature of crime in Japan - which is to say that, to the infinitesimal extent that it exists, it is spectacular and grotesque. The average national crime rate (33.7 per 1000 people according to the UN) is a full 50% above the Japanese overall crime rate (19.177 per 1000 people), but that's nothing compared to the stupefying fact that the average national murder rate is twenty times that of Japan (a near-nonextant 0.00499933 per 1000 people).* Yet, when a murder does occur, it's a horror that could've sprung from the imagination of Wes Craven on bad methamphetamines: children chopping each other up, young nightlife workers defiled & dismembered by men, men dismembered by despondent spouses, knife-wielding lunatics lashing out at anyone within arm's reach, or deformed, cannibalistic shut-ins butchering little girls. Absolutely unspeakable.

But a timely opportunity to examine the strange nature of crime in Japan though it may be, I'm damn tired and haven't the stomach to ruminate at length about the above atrocities right before bed time. Besides, attempting to either legislate around or prepare for psychopathologically-driven assaults is like trying to do the same for lightning or earthquakes.

*Discussion of the fact that Japan, on the other hand, has more than double the average national suicide rate will likewise have to wait.

Scare Tactics

Hallowe'en has never been a big deal in Japan. This is largely because of the absence of the entire cultural context (however flimsy & fabricated) for the holiday, but also because there's already more than enough opportunity to apply ghoulish makeup and extravagant costumery. This year, however, appears to be different: paper skeletons & plastic jack-o-laterns are ubiquitous, and every nightclub (as opposed to only the ones that cater to foreigners) is hosting some kind of haunted happening. Granted, I've been absent the past two years, but my friends here confirm that this sudden enthusiasm in All Hallow's Eve has arrived without warning. I'm convinced this is an economic stimulus effort that's helping to resurrect the Japanese economy: hype an accessory-emphatic holiday, pushing everyone to purchase the necessary accoutrement.

I doubt that Hallowe'en will become a staple of the fall season, though. Other countries have had fleeting love affairs with the holiday, only to discard it once the novelty wore off and the candy hangovers kicked in. In the early part of this decade, that bastion of high culture France "went batty" over Hallowe'en, reclaiming their stake in the ancient European celebration while enjoying its New World lunacy. A few years later, of course, the French lived up to their reputation and quickly ditched Hallowe'en like the autumnal fad it was. Now, Hallowe'en is little more than an excuse for an extra ladies' night on a nightclub's event calendar.

Which isn't to say nothing scary happens on Hallowe'en in France. Last year, I witnessed in Paris some of the most ghetto bullshit I've seen since leaving Baltimore. Traveler's Tip: when some drunk steps to you in the 11th arrondissement, let it slide and believe him when he says he makes bank. I don't care about their military history, the French will fuck you up if they have to.

Click on the mix title to download.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

1. Black Sabbath - "Black Sabbath"
2. The Birthday Party - "Release the Bats"
3. Chain & the Gang - "Cemetary Map"
4. Public Image Ltd. - "Graveyard"
5. Wendy Carlos - "The Shining (Main Titles)"
6. The Caretaker - "Haunted Ballroom"
7. The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Nineteen666"
8. Scientist - "The Voodoo Curse"
9. Pete Rugolo - "Finger of Fear"
10. Suicide - "Ghost Rider"
11. Big Lazy - "Just Plain Scared"
12. Johnny Pearson - "Graveyard"
13. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "Fire"
14. David Bowie - "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)"
15. Teeth Mountain - "Ghost Science"
16. The Bourbons - "A Dark Corner"
17. The Fall - "Mansion"
18. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Red Right Hand"
19. Lucifer - "Exorcism"
20. Lord Dent & His Invaders - "Wolf Call"
21. Sonic Youth - "Hallowe'en"