\\Minds Like Knives//

Un MU.ZZ.LE

2012-01-30T19:17:00.000-08:00

I find myself deeply and sharply inspired by the Xanga page Findingatiger. It's an achingly personal journal of what could probably look from the outside like a pretty boring life. It's a real journal, but it's written with both the arcing ambition of a piece of serious fiction and, intentionally or not, in a fragmented, attention-fractured voice that either 'captures' or simply really is the way people in their twenties now think, talk, and feel. It is literary in heft, while still being utterly trivial in content. It makes me ask a quite serious question about how much of our life is inner and how much objective and factual. It also encourages me to maybe try some things in this blog that I haven't tried in this or any other space in some time.

I was thinking about my life - my by many measures extremely lucky, slightly crazy, weird life over the past ten years. And I compared it to the slight echo of disappointment that lingered in the air after all of it. The idea that maybe I haven't been great, or that I was not entirely present for the moments that counted, or I have been so awkward-and-proud-of-it that I've missed one too many things to make my weirdness worth it. It's impossible to know, I guess - it's like that old question about whether my 'green' is the same as your 'green,' and how could we know if we can't literally get inside one another's brains? Maybe some people see and feel the drama and turmoil of their inner lives simply because they spend the time looking there. Maybe I can be such a chipper dude simply because my brain chemistry is like whatever's the opposite of psychotic.

I'm listening to the new Gonjasufi album, MU.ZZ.LE. I put it on right after the Bad Brains' I Against I, so I must be on some sort of thing. The Bad Brains was what I put on after I bailed on Occupy Tampa for the night. I stopped by very briefly, just long enough to hear the start of a conversation about the kitchen that I really didn't have even the slightest desire to stick around for. A substantial part of energy in the camp is going now into these sorts of discussions - which as simple as they sound, regularly explode into massive personality conflicts that stretch over multiple meetings, night after night. This is because the camp is made up more than anything else by asocial narcissists, including longtime homeless, travellers, borderline head cases, and apparent drug addicts.

It took less than a month for this population to make up the critical mass of the 24/7 occupation of Occupy Tampa. I have some serious concerns about where we go from here, despite the valiant efforts of several organizers to keep momentum going into several ongoing and exciting projects. The idea of the 'occupation' has been so crucial to the appeal of the movement in the public eye - but I have seen much firsthand, not just in Tampa but in New York City, to suggest that in the long term these occupations might have destroyed themselves - that in fact the police in cities across the country are doing Occupy a huge image favor in decamping them before their tents become symbols, not of freedom and uprising, but of needle drug use and screaming matches.

What does this say about the ethos of the Occupy movement, its commitments to horizontalism and autonomy? Well, it leaves me sorely tempted to declare that, at least at the very extremes, there are people for whom the chance to make their own decisions represents a clear and present danger to themselves and others. Occupy has attracted a great number of, first, genuinely mentally ill people, and second, borderline personality types. People shout to get attention, and turn it into a fight when shouting isn't enough. People badmouth one another and scream and cry. People require regular trips to the hospital from participants with cars, for injuries incurred long ago and far away.

And yet. These people are broken, beat, tired - and yet I can't bring myself to dismiss them, to throw up my hands in despair. They are struggling just like the rest of us. And god knows, this is where any of us could end up if we were taken off our Xanax and put in a minimum wage job for ten years struggling to take care of kids and a wife and a house until one day suddenly it's all gone away. Or been put out of the house at fourteen and made to fend for ourselves. Or had to grow up transgendered in a macho Latino family. Sometimes the cliches are just true.

We all fancy ourselves misfits, we suburban white kids and Brooklyn hipsters, but how ready are we to recognize a real one? I've never been one of the hipster haters, I think that art is essential to progress and pretension is essential to art. But the almost complete lack of trendy participation in Occupy has maybe disturbed the comfortable fiction I'd so long lived with that under all the superficial bullshit these people shared my discontent. That their consumerism was, as they often claimed, somehow ironic. But I saw a cute couple the other day, in Ray-Bans and cutoffs, and realized I've never felt more distant from people like that. They were suddenly only slightly less offensive to me than the Britnis and Bobbys who had tormented my high school years (or at least haunted my imagination).

Occupy, at least out here in the real hinterland, is a province of the true fringe - the left behind, the kicked out, and the fucked up. And even though I don't always look like it or often give in to it, I'm one of those myself. I mean, I guess I must be, or why am I spending so much time with this gang of losers? I went to the Publix Greenwise a few miles from the Occupy Tampa camp tonight - it's a kind of commercial-organics-froufrou grocery store, like a low-rent Whole Foods. It was full of beautiful women in their early 30s, shopping alone. They were dressed like me, in the nearly automatic neat-creative mode that comes with giving a shit and making an adult, white salary. But there was something in their eyes, something scared and vacant and confused. They didn't know (and here comes another true cliche) how they could still be unhappy after buying the things they had been told to want.

I can't deal with that. And I'm also realizing: maybe the only thing stopping me from truly feeling those situations, that amazing past I've travelled through, was that I haven't spent enough time writing about it. I am a writer - why is this not how I've been creating myself?

Delicious Old Wine, Shiny New Bottle

2012-01-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

Haveyou heard? Occupy Tampa has expanded its Occupation from Curtis Hixon park toVoice of Freedom Park at 2101 W Main Street, Tampa FL 33607. This isincredibly exciting, and represents a shot in the arm at a time when manyOccupations are facing huge uphill battles.

Thepark is owned by Joe Redner, a local businessman and activist, who has given OTcarte blanche to use the space as they see fit. This presents all kindsof new opportunities and challenges. The group has been forged in thefires of a months-long confrontation with the police, and the opportunity totruly organize infrastructure and facilities may allow that energy to bechanneled in new and interesting directions.

Eitherway, the space is incredible - as you can see above, we have a fire pit! There's also a kitchen:

And a medical tent:

There's also power and wi-fi, though there's still workongoing to solidify the latter. I'll be working on a more in-depthdiscussion of what this means and what challenges remain, but in the meantime,head on down and check it out for yourself!

(All above photos are taken from Occupy Tampa's Facebookpage)

From Here On Out: Where Occupy Tampa Has Been, and Where It Can Go Next

2011-12-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Tampa Food Not Bombs and Occupy Tampa jointly held aluncheon at Voice of Freedom Park near central Tampa, Florida. Voice of Freedom (VoF) is a park privatelyowned by Joe Redner, a Tampa entrepreneur and frequently outspoken publicfigure. The event included not just somegreat food from FNB, but several great activities for local kids and training forOccupy participants. There was some press coverage, a good number of visitors both from out of town and from the local community.

Though it was by design small and casual, yesterday’s eventrepresents an important evolution of Occupy Tampa specifically, and may offersome useful points of reflection for other Occupy groups.

Occupy Tampa has, for most of its existence,had to contend above all with both the strategy and practical dimension of a full-timeoccupation. The City of Tampa and agroup of early occupiers hashed out a barely satisfactory compromise – thegroup was allowed to sleep, without structures, on a narrow strip of sidewalknext to a city park. There have been alot of advantages to this location – it has relatively high foot traffic,making for a lot of good discussion, as well as the bare minimum of continuitynecessary for building an organization. Ipersonally feel that in reaching this initial compromise, the City of Tampa andthe Tampa Police Department displayed some willingness to work with OccupyTampa.

But in practice, and as time has gone on, the situation hasproven unacceptable in a few ways. Thesidewalk’s location next to a four-lane road makes sleeping dangerous, and it’snot terribly comfortable. But more thanthat, for uncertain reasons, police harassment has escalated over the past twomonths. The TPD, who seemed cordial orat least neutral towards Occupiers initially, has increasingly turned hostile,as evidenced by an array of arrests on petty charges such as trespassing (thatis, someone stepped over the park’s property line after its closing hour), therepeated confiscation of the property of Occupiers (that is, someone placedtheir backpack on the wrong side of the park’s property line and walked too faraway), and worst of all, a series of trumped-up battery charges againstOccupiers who, for example, had the temerity to try and pull their belongingsback into the space they are ‘allowed’ to use before police could confiscatethem. While Tampa has seen nothing ofthe scale or severity of the overt militarist policing in places like UC Davis,the police here are nonetheless being put to work in suppressing dissent.

This is why on December 1^st, as a way to dramatizethe many small ways in which the rights of citizens were being trampled, OccupyTampa moved forward with Public Space Liberation Day, in which about 150protestors marched from Curtis Hixon to Julian B. Lane Waterfront Park, wherethey held a general assembly, told stories about why they were involved in Occupy, held meditation classes, and conducted a candlelight vigil inrecognition of World AIDS Day. As youmight expect, the City of Tampa’s response to such radical and disruptive activitieswas to dispatch twelve police cruisers and two dozen police officers toencircle and forcibly eject participants, then finally to arrest 29 Occupierswho refused to leave the park.

While this outcome was disappointing on many levels, it wasneither unexpected nor truly a defeat. Theaction and its reaction served as a slightly more formalized version of theevictions that are now taking place across the country, and like each of them,it was a dramatization of the oligarchic, militarized, anti-citizen, andovertly oppressive – in short, fascistic – ethos that drives many policedepartments and municipal governments across the U.S.

The playing out of this highly educational drama has left Tampaand other Occupations at an acute transition point – it has been demonstratedquite clearly that the right of the people to assemble peaceably is under veryliteral attack in the U.S. This has been illustrated as far as any reasonable standard demands. There isn't much further we can push the point. In many ways,this is liberating. As important as thebattles for space has been in capturing the public imagination and galvanizingthe movement, they have never been the main purpose of Occupy. The confrontation with authority, in which authorityshowed its illegitimacy so clearly, forms the first and most fundamental partof an argument that Occupy will spend the coming years laying out for citizensof the globe. Now is the time to move onto the other parts of that argument.

Back now to the luncheon. Joe Redner’s offer of the use of this park may ultimately direct OccupyTampa in one out of a number of possible ways forward. The park is located in a predominantly black,lower- income community. SeveralOccupation sites have made efforts to reach beyond the (broadlyspeaking) young, white, middle class demographic that has largely defined themovement. Occupy Oakland and OccupyChicago have made efforts in this direction with varying levels of success, and(the in my opinion not very well named) Occupy the Hood has worked to encouragethe participation of people of color in Occupy.

This luncheon had no such codified purpose – rather, it wassimply an effort to notify people in the community of the presence of OccupyTampa, to begin fostering local connections, and to do something unambiguouslypositive and constructive after so much energy devoted to important actionsthat happened to be fairly aggressive in tone.

The atmosphere at the park was both uplifting and slightlysurreal. About ten kids from theneighborhood, some with adult supervision in tow but many not, were drawn tothe event. We had kickball, four-square,crafts, and of course cookies on hand for them (There was also plenty of healthy food served, at least some of it to kids). But even as thekickball game was going on, a trio of field medics visiting from Occupy Miamiwere demonstrating the proper use and maintenance of a gas mask, and how to usea formula of Maalox to treat pepper-spray victims. We had a steady stream of locals come throughto enjoy the amazing meals prepared by Tampa Food Not Bombs. Many of them were aware of Occupy, but manywere not. One very important opportunityfor improvement in our outreach efforts would be in literature availability, sothat Occupy Tampa can spread the word about what they stand for without seeminglike aggressive proselytizers.

Overall, reception in the neighborhood was warm, butcautious. People were trying to get a bead on this strange group of (sometimes very funny-looking) outsiders. We ultimately did not have a general assemblyon the site because it had not been previously consented to, though I hope thathappens in the future – demonstrating direct democracy in action is certainlythe best way to promote interest in it.

There is a clear and inspiring model here for continuingaction both on this site and, potentially, at sites across the city. A well-organized afternoon festival thatoffers immediate practical benefits - programs and information, entertainment,and food – can be a powerful tool for entering communities and beginning theprocess of spreading the practice of direct democracy, learning about localconditions, educating people about the broad conditions underpinning economicinjustice, and broadening the pool of leaders that make up Occupy.

Many things could beoffered at future events:

-Generally, Anything we can accomplish that people tellus they want.

-Organized Games for Kids

-Food Not Bombs – Food Distribution

-Recipes

-Free Market

-Free Literature

– This should include as much as possible onthe basics. What is Occupy? What isconsensus? What was the financial crisis, how has it effected us, and how are we responding?

-Daytime public concerts

-Lending Library

-Consensus Process Training

-Training in Practical Self-Reliance

-T-ShirtMaking! Cleaning-Supply making! Etc.!

-Community Gardening

-Fitness and Meditation sessions for adults and children

Even the small services that were provided on Saturday meanta lot to the people who came to Voice of Freedom park. The potential to do real good on the samemodel is nearly limitless.

Ritual Unrest - On the Symbolism of Occupation

2011-12-05T11:04:00.001-08:00

On the evening of Thursday, December 1^st, atabout 8pm, a group of about 150 people operating as Occupy Tampa conducted amarch from Curtis Hixon Park in Downtown Tampa to Julian Lane Riverfront Park. After arriving at Julian Lane, members of thegroup held a meeting at the park’s ampitheatre and collectively agreed toestablish an encampment there. The groupthen moved to a small hill, where they pitched a handful of tents. At 10:56 pm, 13 unmarked Tampa PoliceDepartment squad cars pulled into the parking lot of Julian Lane Park, andaround 30 police officers moved into the park. They issued a warning to the group of campers that they were trespassingin the now-closed park. After allowingseveral members of the group to exit willingly, the police surrounded those whorefused to leave. Two hours later, 29people had been arrested for trespassing and, in many cases, resisting arrest.

These facts, like most, do not speak for themselves.

There is little inherent to them thatillustrates why these things occurred, or what they meant. Some in the media and in society at large have chosen to dismiss or diminish them as the mischief of misguided kids or clueless dropouts. But the larger national situation, in which dozensof similar actions have unfolded as expressions of widespread economic andpolitical grievances , lend them a significance that deserves to be spelledout.

This single event is part of the larger focus of the Occupymovement on freedom of speech and access to the political process. Theelement of this movement that most dramatically separates it from thedemonstrations that have become conventional since the Civil Rights Movement isthe idea of permanent occupation of public space. This allows for a kind of free speech muchmore profound than that of demonstrators carrying placards with five-syllableslogans. Occupation enables conversation,allowing people to meet and come to know one another over days and weeks, not merelyhours - and through that to forge strong bonds based on common interest. Attempts to occupy public space,such as the one in Tampa on Friday, are assertions that if parks are indeedpublic resources, then there are few more legitimate uses of such space thanfor discussion of the future of our country, and further, that attempts to puta curfew on such speech are unconstitutional.

That, though, is only the most immediate implication ofactions like Friday's. What may be moreprofound is the point that was made about the attitude of our society's most powerful towards citizens. By all accounts, including many I’ve gathered directly from participants, the TampaPolice Department mostly handled themselves professionally and courteously evenas they were arresting demonstrators. Bethat as it may, the disturbing absurdity of the situation was hard to miss. Activities occurring in the park during thetwo hours before demonstrators were evicted and arrested included group hugs,individuals sharing their motivations for demonstrating, and a meditationcircle. These activities were met with force.

Most political action that has truly resonated over the lastcentury has been of this sort – symbolic, with a concrete and small actiontaken at a critical point that, when met with government force, points towardsthe larger and deeper contradictions and injustice of a sociopoliticalsystem. When Gandhi marched to the seato make salt, it was not because he wanted to make salt. In fact, if he had succeeded, the action would not have been as successful. The attempt was an assertion of theIndian people’s right to economic self-determination – and representatives of theBritish Empire chose to fully play their own symbolic role as merciless hegemon. The Freedom Riders did not board busses boundfor Mississippi because they actually wanted to go there (god forbid), but to exposemuch more fundamental problems. Whenlocal police forces assaulted and arrested the Riders, they exposed thesouthern states’ blatant disrespect for federal law and the values of equalitymany Americans took for granted.

Likethese movements, Occupy is engaged in the creation of momentary conflicts thatexpose the oligarchical and authoritarian nature of the system in which we now live. The point of these actions is certainly not to antagonize or demean the police, but to force those who control them to play their hand more publicly and bluntly than they might like. The fact that occupations are being so aggressively forestalled displays the governments' deep hostility to the independence of its citizens.

Themost important message of this sort of direct action, though, is not itscritique of those at the top of the power structure, but its celebration ofthose closer to the bottom. In the scaleof the problems facing people nationally and globally, spending three hoursmarching and half a day in jail rank pretty low. But that nearly 200 people willingly chose todevote slices of their busy lives to this action, and that 29 of them chose torisk financial and professional blowback that we are only tentatively beginningto comprehend, is a testament to the seriousness with which people arecommitted to this effort. For many ofthe organizers of this event, it represented a first attempt at something completelynew, an assertion of collective power based on nothing but willpower and time. It makes one thing abundantly clear – this isnot going away.

WTSP - Bought, Paid For, and Worth Every Penny.

2011-11-29T09:07:00.000-08:00

You can’t expect much from local news, with anchors hired primarily for their hair and content intended to titillate mouth-breathers. But on Tuesday night, Tampa’s WTSP 10 mixed up the usual local palette of heroic three-legged dogs and unfilled potholes with coverage of the most important political event of the last year – the Occupy movement. Predictably, understanding the significance of Occupy and presenting it to its viewers in a coherent, balanced manner proved too much for their pretty little heads.

The story that aired last night was focused on Occupy Tampa, and it made no bones about being a "gotcha" attack. The tagline - "Are Occupy Protestor's Hypocrites?" - invites only one answer, and the setup during the show was no more subtle. “They say they want change, but do they practice what they preach? A look into some of the protestor’s own voting records, and some startling results.” The meat of the story is that the station had pulled the voting records of the 22 participants who have been arrested since the beginning of the Tampa Occupation about six weeks ago. Their findings were that of the 22, 64% were registered to vote, about 33% voted in the last presidential election, just under 25% voted in the primary, 15% voted in the 2010 midterm, and less than 10% voted in recent municipal elections.

Leaving aside the issues with sampling, these are objectively not good numbers. As the smug, spray-tanned, pudgy male anchor framed it, “many [Occupiers] may be a bit hypocritical.” But, blinded either by its overt hostility to Occupy (whose motivations we'll get to in a second) or by a more basic inability to see further than the tip of their nose, WTSP’s team failed to put them into any kind of context.

How much differently might their viewers have taken the depiction of Occupy as a bunch of insincere louts if they’d been reminded that overall national turnout in the last presidential election was about 68%, and for the 2010 midterms was about 38%? Suddenly we’re looking, not at a few disenfranchised arrestees, but at an entire nation so disillusioned that two-thirds don’t participate in the political process at one of the most crucial moments in its history. But this contextual information was, of course, omitted from the report.

Even more fundamentally disturbing was the way the story framed voting as the only legitimate way to participate in a democracy. There was some screen time given to the Occupiers' contention that, in a democracy bought and paid for before the election even starts, voting will never succeed in overturning government by the rich, for the rich (just ask poor John Huntsman). But reporter Noah Pransky dismissed - or rather, ignored - all these claims by pointing out that “there is a mechanism available to the people who are unhappy with politicians – the ballot box.” The entire story was set up to reinforce the idea that voting is the single necessary and sufficient component of participation in politics. I’m sure this indulges the lazy schadenfreude of WTSP’s self-satisfied middle-class audience, but it’s an insult to anyone who paid attention during high school U.S. History. WTSP is happy to help its viewers forget that every significant change in American political culture, from women's voting rights to the 8-hour day to civil rights, required action in the streets.

And no wonder. I’m sure all the good-looking white people on screen for WTSP’s broadcast are perfectly happy with the status quo (Seriously, check their staff bios page – it's like looking at a sleeve full of Saltines). They’re comfortably sponsored by the Suntrust Bank, the retail banking subsidiary of SunTrust Banks, Inc., a bank holding company. Thanks to the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act – also known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB) – bank holding companies like Suntrust have spent the last decade aggressively expanding their portfolios. Before GLB, retail banks provided vital local services in things like home and small business loans, which they carefully vetted. After GLB, they became speculative casinos, packaging home loans into arcane products called Collaterallized Debt Obligations that obscured the underlying value of the loans and encouraged risky lending practices. This is the sort of behavior that caused the financial crisis, and that the Occupy movement is trying to stop by working for the rollback of GLB and the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall act.

So, it’s no wonder that WTSP, as a bought and paid for propaganda outlet for the financial sector, wants to delegitimize a threat as scary as Occupy. Despite falling profits, Suntrust CEO James Wells received a 33% pay raise in 2010, pushing his total compensation up to $10.3 million. The reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, which would force companies like SunTrust to return to the sober, responsible, slow-growth world of retail banking, would be a huge blow to what I’m sure is Wells’ very comfortable lifestyle.

But this is just par for the course. WTSP is one of many media outlets with an only passing interest in the truth, or in what’s best for America. In a way, they’re geniuses – to perform the semblance of ‘news’ so beautifully without actually providing any insight into the current configuration requires a level of insititutional and individual self-delusion that most humans would find demeaning and soul-crushing. Take, as the most obvious example, the story that immediately preceded the report on Occupy Tampa – the news that Tampa home prices have now declined almost fifty percent since the peak of the housing market only four years ago, with the average home price down from to $204,829 in 2007 to $105,048 now. This deflation (or, rather, the bubble preceding it) were of course caused by the regulatory irresponsibility and corporate greed of banks including SunTrust - but WTSP’s report failed to even attempt a superficial explanation of the systemic problems that have cost Tampa residents millions of dollars in equity, even as their lenders continue enjoying buying yachts and other luxury goods at record rates.

This organization is part of the fourth estate – journalism – so called because it is expected to operate outside the three branches of government while also providing the information vital to keeping a democracy functioning well. Journalists are supposedly tasked with informing their audience about the world, helping them make good decisions at the ballot box. Is it any wonder that American voters are disillusioned, when the very outlets that are supposed to help them understand their world are clearly under the influence of organizations profiting from their ignorance? For an organization like WTSP to accuse political activists of hypocrisy for not participating in the machine that they themselves are helping to rig is an absolute obscenity. I’m not sure how any of these people live with themselves, but I hope the decidedly 99% salary Noah Pransky is taking home makes it worth being part of an institution that is actively harming its viewers.

Just another cog in the machine.

ASAP Rocky is the fucking future

2011-09-24T20:37:00.000-07:00

I didn't post about it when it came out, but it's taken me a month or two ago, but it's taken me that long to really absorb what genius this track is. Somehow the most amazing part is how conventional the lyrics and imagery are - and yet it totally embraces its own mythic dimension, twisting it around so the 'hood is the most unreal place possible, a slow-motion fantasy without equal.

How I Invented Witch House

2011-08-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

No, seriously! I just noticed that Craig Eley, master of Field Noise, current member of Datagun and former member, with me, of Single Indian Tear, has posted our little-seen non-masterpiece, a 30-minute remix and re-scoring of Dario Argento's epic Tenebre.

This was performed about two and a half years ago, and while it's not nearly as polished as the Pictureplane or Salem stuff that was coming out at about the same time (in our defense, the sound here is from a live recording) we were really treading some strangely similar water - dance beats, analog synths, and vintage spook themes. It's particularly striking if you check out the stretch from about 5:30 above, or the beginning of Part 2 below.

Part 2:

Basic Training: Japanese Hip Hop as a Legacy of Militarism

2011-07-31T04:37:00.000-07:00

Image and some info from Mixtapetroopers

This is the cover of a mix CD put out near the end of 2010 by DJ Muta of Libra Records and Juswanna, Mega-G, and DJ 49 (not really familiar with the latter two guys, but Mega-G apparently hosts an occasional Ustream show). The cover echoes an earlier Japanese hip hop CD cover - I think by Buddha Brand, but I'm not sure? - and the idea of the CD is using the instrumentals from old records and putting new vocals over them. The title connects to military themes and images that have long been prominent in U.S. and, in turn, Japanese hip hop. Examples that jump to mind include Public Enemy's S1W security/dance troupe and the Wu-Tang Clan-affiliated Killarmy, who took the contemporary trend for camouflage to a logical conclusion.

But in Japan the military connection is particularly deep and multidimensional, going back the better part of two centuries and connecting contemporary Japanese hip hop to the forces of Western imperialism and Japanese modernization. And "Basic Training" is specifically part of it. In his book Kokka to Ongaku [Nation and Music], Okunaka Yasuto tells the fascinating story of how the bakufu, the military government of Japan in the fading years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, came to introduce Western music to Japan for the first time (with the exception of missionary music that Christians had brought in the 15th century before their exclusion).

The motivation was not aesthetic - the introduction of the fife-and-drum corps was part of the bakufu's efforts to upgrade their military forces to modern standards of uniformity and organization. The Japanese military before the mid-19th century had their well-known equivalent of knights - the samurai - who mostly engaged in single combat on open fields or rode independently on horseback.. Then they had foot soldiers, who were decidedly not the equivalent of relatively well-organized English men-at-arms and bowmen. Rather, they tended to be utterly untrained and undisciplined peasants who ran around in chaotic masses. This was all well and good when they were fighting each other, but as soon as the bakufu became cognizant of the threat posed by the better-organized and -armed Western powers, they became quick students of modern military arts - or at least, to the extent that they could through the somewhat narrow channel of information they had access to, Dutch scholarship.

Along with technology (mainly guns), the bakufu realized they needed to adopt discipline, and this was strongly rooted in drilling and marching. There are some pretty fantastic scenes in, if I remember correctly, The Seven Samurai that suggest just how important the drum would have been to implementing uniform drilling. The townspeople that Takashi Shimura's character attempts to teach have a firmly ingrained habit of running at top speed and with no sense of unit cohesion when under the duress of training, up to and including running into each other.

Shogunate Troops with Drum

I found a trove of great information about this period over at Axis History (a site whose politics I know nothing about). The drum was introduced, along with other reforms, by Takashima Shuuhan, as a tool for management, giving marchers a guide for timing their step, regulating their speed, and in turn, staying out of one another's way. Here is a frame of drum scores from the book he released, and here's a great video of a contemporary troupe re-enacting what a pre-Meiji Japanese military band might have looked and sounded like:

This was, of course, a pivotal moment in Japanese history, of which the musical impact was among the smallest parts. But the link between music and militarism continued. Take, for instance, the so-called gunka, military or patriotic songs largely derived from the Prussian tradition (which replaced Dutch Learning as the basis for Japanese military practice in the Meiji era). And while the flowering of jazz in Tokyo starting in the 1920s was part of the strongly anti-militarist "Taisho Democracy," the groundwork for it was no doubt laid in part by the exposure to Western sounds that had started with Japan's military - particularly since military instruments were much closer to the sounds of jazz than the palette used in classical music, the other musical import aggressively promoted by the Japanese government as part of Meiji reforms.

But the biggest further impact of militarism on Japanese music came, of course, during the American occupation. During this time there were massive food shortages among the Japanese general public, and working musicians would certainly have mostly belonged to this group of the not-particularly-elevated. The only people with food and money in abundance were the occupying forces, so Japanese musicians quickly learned to play what the American soldiers wanted to hear - initially jazz, which they would have already understood well, and later early versions of rock and roll. The same dynamic continued into roughly contemporary times, though not in Tokyo - even today, the areas of Okinawa's capital city of Naha surrounding the American bases have clothing stores and music shops catering specifically to black American soldiers, forming a cultural resource for Japanese youth with any sort of interest in hip hop.

The bigger questions here are profound. I had long assumed that the story of Western music in Japan began with Admiral Perry's landing and the group of minstrels he brought with him, making the entire ensuing history of Western music in Japan a matter of imperial imposition. But this isn't the case at all - as happened again and again throughout Japanese history, something was consciously adopted from abroad as part of attempts to transform Japan into a nation that could compete internationally (that 'internationally' is complicated but key - at this point the Bakufu were reforming the military as part of a frantic rearguard action against international interference, so in some sense they were trying to keep from internationalizing - but were nonetheless doing just that). The same pattern would continue over the next century-plus, in music as in other things.

Percussion Lab - Saturn Never Sleeps - Exclusive DJ Mix

2011-07-28T07:52:00.000-07:00

This is some really compelling stuff, a mix of a huge variety of understated dub-pop and fractured science-fiction soul. One early revelatory moment is the "Billie Jean" remix at about the five minute mark, which turns MJ retroactively into a Frank Ocean from 1985:

Percussion Lab - Saturn Never Sleeps - Exclusive DJ Mix

Oricon and Corruption: The Ugaya Case

2011-07-27T20:41:00.000-07:00

Just a quick set of links I need to follow up on later. In 2006 freelance journalist Ugaya Hiromichi was sued by Oricon for having been quoted suggesting their rankings were not objective, and were perhaps influenced in unethical ways, particularly in connection with Johnny's artists. He does seem to have eventually prevailed, but I haven't yet found details of that aside from a 2009 post made to Ugaya's personal homepage.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070208f2.html

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20080423a4.html

http://ugaya.com/

Exile and Avex: The Very Platonic Form of Shady-Ass Japanese Culture Industries

2011-07-27T19:56:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note about an interesting tidbit I dug up a few days ago. In my conversation with Kuzoku, the creators of the excellent film Off Highway 20 (my preferred translation of the title is a little different from the official one), we got to talking about the 'Yankee Culture' that is so central to their sensibility. Yankee, in this case, refers of course to down-and-out proto-thugs who ride cheap motorcycles and generally don't have much going for them but their hair. There's a scene in Highway 20 where one of the main characters sings a Namie Amuro song in a karaoke box. Amuro, along with Ayumi Hamasaki and Exile, is under the Avex umbrella, though their levels of involvement vary and I've not dug deep enough to determine who's managed by Avex and who just releases their music on an Avex label.

Regardless, the Kuzoku guys painted Avex as pretty much specializing in "Yankee Culture." Exile, with their deep tans, careful facial hair, and upwardly mobile bling-bling image, embody a certain 'neo-yankeeism' that has replaced the more rock-influenced, explicitly anti-authoritarian yankee ethos of the '70s and '80s. Supposedly, EXILE sell pseudo-customized cars reflecting their "VIP" image, though a quick search didn't turn up evidence of that. This is in stark contrast to the "chopped and dropped" customization style that prevailed among Yankee in the past.

Anyway, all that is sort of secondary. The most arresting thing is that Avex both sell this new Yankee ethos and embody it through some pretty shady business practices. The best example is that Avex owns a lot of pachinko parlors, and gives out Exile CDs as prizes, while counting these as 'sales.' Pachinko isn't legally supposed to constitute gambling for money, so counting these CDs as having been 'sold' in exchange for little metal balls seriously calls into question either Japanese gambling law or the Oricon charts. I'm not sure which.

Academic Cliche Watch, Minisode 2: Dyer on "Argumentation by Announcement."

2011-07-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I wrote a post about the phrase "I want to argue that . . .", pointing out just a few of the reasons that it's worthless and destructive to the integrity of academic writing. Geoff Dyer, the genius author of unparalleled books like But Beautiful and Out of Sheer Rage, seems to have noticed the same thing - though not surprisingly, he's responded with a level of subtlety and comprehensiveness that outstrips my modest effort by several degrees of magnitude.

In my defense, he seems to have found the perfect target in Michael Fried's "Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before," which he dissects with a precise brutality that could be paralleled to what Christian Bale did to all those poor women in American Psycho, if it were done in defense of decency and clear thinking. Geoff Dyer is easily one of the most brilliant cultural essayists alive, right in the league of Joan Didion or . . . well, very few others. So to be on the receiving end of such a performance from him, while certainly painful, could also be considered receiving a scolding from someone so elevated the rest of us could hardly be expected to even aspire to the same plane.

That said, I have no sympathy for Fried, who I hope is enjoying the comforting sleep of reason in the bed he's made for himself.

The Dance of Fate: Success and Failure in Music Business and Music Life

2011-07-23T20:34:00.000-07:00

I spent much of yesterday helping a friend move into a new place. This friend is also the owner and manager of a mid-sized independent record label in Tokyo - I met him initially through my research and have spent a lot of time with him since. There were about a dozen people there to help, but since he'd also hired a super-efficient group of professional movers, there wasn't quite enough to keep everyone busy. In the end, it was more than anything a group celebration of a new stage in the life of a man who was to various degrees friend, business associate, or boss to the rest of us.

The condo he was moving into with his fiance was pretty great by Tokyo standards, a three-story with space for a guest room, a room that will serve as the fiance's home office, a really nice kitchen, a ground-floor patio AND a second-floor balcony - and most important, room for the baby they'll be having in just a couple of months. I also got to see the apartment they'd occupied for the previous five years, a small, cramped space that I could hardly believe had held the two of them and their dog. The move was a moment of success, mostly paid for by the truly righteous work my friend does providing a place for artists outside of Japan's major-label system, putting on shows that attract thousands of people and festivals that attract tens of thousands.

I was reminded of a quite different celebration I went to a month or two ago. Another friend of mine, a DJ and producer, held a release event for his latest EP. It was in an obscure bar in Shibuya, not even really an event space, just barely big enough to hold the fifty to sixty people who showed up. The release was a CD in a hand-stamped/painted sleeve. It was a fun event, full of people who were friends with the star of the evening, and with each other, but who had basically no potential to make money from or through one another. I talked to my friend after the event, and learned that the EP had been released in a miniscule run of 300, and also that he hadn't DJed or done any shows in the six months preceding. He had, however, recently met a woman he was planing to marry, and said he was going to start looking for work more reliable than his current gig at an amusement park. He knew that if he took a full-time job, he wouldn't be able to keep going with music consistently. But he said that he had accomplished many things he wanted to (releasing an album or two, playing plenty of shows, working with other gifted musicians) and was ready to move on. He struck me as genuinely happy.

I'm at a stage in my life where I inevitably think about success and the long arc of human life quite a bit, and the comparison between these two is fascinating, if not entirely illuminating. They've arrived at similar stages of their lives in dramatically different shape. One had built a small empire and was able to live comfortably. He works incredibly hard, but is moving in a straight line that seems to lead only upward. The other is about to go through a transition that promises to be both exciting and wrenching, as he tries to launch a sustainable career in his early thirties.

What's the difference between these two? One reason it's an interesting comparison is that their musical interests are about equally accessible - not pop, but not noise, either - so we can eliminate that as a determiner of "success." In many months of getting to know these two guys, the difference seems to be simply how hard and consistently they've worked, and how goal-oriented they've been. From my friend the DJ/producer, I always got the sense that music occupied a vague space between hobby and ambition. He was around people with an equally hazy vision. On the other hand, the label head has had his priorities very much in order since he was in his late teens, when he skipped college to pursue music promotion. In addition to working about sixty hours a week, he very much treats music as a business.

But there seem to have been tradeoffs, corollaries to these two men's different natures. My friend the DJ is a profoundly warm person, generous and cheerful and relaxed. He is surrounded by friends who like him for himself, many of whom enjoy making music with him, but as a communal rather than commercial activity. The ties that bind them are personal and intimate. The label head, on the other hand, is surrounded almost entirely by people he works with. Now, this is a million miles from the sad workaholism it might sound like - the reason he got into the music business in the first place was because he loved working with artists, with musicians, photographers, writers. These are people with interesting personalities, and maybe we should all be so lucky as to enjoy the permeable boundaries between friendship and work that my friend does. I certainly know I enjoy this in my own life - the relationship we share is exactly one of these business/friendships. But I also know firsthand that there's a certain gnawing emptiness to it, a need to get outside of the circumference of the functional and be with other people purely for their own sake. I sometimes sense that this label head has sacrificed more than might be immediately obvious - that the cost of making his own path has been a hypervigilance that separates him, every so slightly, from the rhythms of normal human social life.

There's no line here between good or bad, the right or wrong way to do things. Both of these people have led incredibly rich lives, and done great services to the rest of their community and culture. Certainly the more important distinction to be made from those who have not felt empowered to pursue their grand dreams, or those who were never lucky enough to have them in the first place. Those are the people - arguably, the 'normal' people - who I truly can't understand. But even within the realm of the creative, there is a wide spectrum of approaches, ambitions, ideas, personalities . . . and we eventually find our way back to the most difficult question of all, that of will. My friend the label head indulged in some very rare self-mythologizing last night, telling the brief story of his (entirely legal) entrepreneurialism as a teenager. The money he made from this early dip into business let him buy the records that inspired him onto his current path. None of what followed would have happened without that early moment when some built-in impulse to buy low and sell high kicked in - but at the time it was with no goal in mind, something you could even call instinctual. In turn, he's had a profound impact on hundreds, maybe thousands of Japanese kids by putting interesting music in their hands.

Megane Super Rapper

2011-07-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

Megane Suupaa (literally, "Glasses Supermarket") is a pretty bland chain of big-box glasses retailers throughout Japan. But this one guy in Shinjuku is semi-famous for pitching their deals on glasses and contacts in the form of high-speed and basically not bad rap. Just another little sign that, while it might not be nearly as dominant as it is in the U.S., hip hop has nonetheless penetrated deeply into the fabric of Japanese life (well, okay, at least urban life).

The Least Wu-Tang of All Wu-Tangs: AKB48 and the Bulbous Egg Sac

2011-07-20T05:51:00.000-07:00

Credit for the strange title goes to Actionbutton.net, whose review of Darksiders sussed out the idealized features of "Zelda" as a game type, and used that as a rubric for finding Darksiders "particularly Zelda" (though not particularly a good game). I had an apparently similar insight last year when I first started learning about AKB48, a hugely popular pop idol enterprise, who superficially capitalize on a music marketing trick first pursued by the Wu-Tang Clan. AKB, started in 2005, has (yes) 48 members, and they are divided into a series of ranks, grades, and 'teams' which form a variety of sub-groups, fulfill different roles, and appeal to a variety of different fans, all while operating under the same umbrella. This makes AKB48 a many-headed dragon, each head strengthening the constantly-growing body - pretty much in the same way Rae and Ghost would go off and do a couple things, building their own brands and Wu-Tang's all at once.

But AKB48 take everything a step farther. Today was the release date for the first single, "The Extinct Brunette," by NMB48 [warning: don't watch if your faith in humanity is tenuous, it's an unbelievable mess]. Founded just last year, NMB are a parallel AKB, with the same massive, complexly tiered internal structure. While AKB stands for Akihabara, NMB stands for Namba, a section of Osaka. There's also SKE48, started in 2008 and based in Aichi Prefecture. Finally, there's the slight variation of SDN48, with the SDN standing for "Saturday Night" and suggesting the very slightly more adult orientation of that group, composed in part of 'graduates' from AKB (aka women who can no longer pretend to be little girls).

Akimoto Yasushi,
who I hope is proud of himself.

So, with four groups of 48 members each, and numerous smaller formations within each of those, the AKB empire begins to look like a Wu-Tang of Wu-Tangs, as if Killarmy and Sunz of Man had each become a hit factory in its own right. Except, that is, for the part where this Meta-Tang (copyright) is put together by a svengali-like behind-the-scenes producer, Akimoto Yasushi. Wu-Tang negotiated its revolutionary deal as a true group (albeit initially with RZA in a clear leadership role), from a position of little power, and with an eye towards a democratic future in which they could all be equals, without at the same time having to submit entirely to the risks of rule by committee. By contrast, AKB and its spawn were the creation of one man, and every move made can be assumed to have the goal of further enriching him.

You can question a lot of what Wu-Tang have done over the years, but despite the strategic nature of their business arrangements, their music has never been carefully market-conscious. Frankly, they just got really lucky for a few years there, and have since returned to their proper place as vanguardists. The AKB organization, on the other hand, applies the Wu-Tang model to aesthetic, image, and marketing decisions that range from run of the mill pop-machine exploitation to borderline sociopathic mind-fuckery to just remarkably dumb. An instance of the former was the recent introduction of "Aimi Eguchi," a new member who turned out to be a computer amalgamation of five other top members (and whose name was actually a play on the gum she was digitally created to promote). More nefarious, and vastly more fundamental to the AKB plan for domination, is the annual 'election' of the most popular member of the group. This is like a less-democratic version of American Idol, especially since to be able to vote you have to buy a copy of the group's most recent single. There are images floating around of obsessive AKB fans who supposedly bought dozens or hundreds of copies of the single to vote for their favorite member - in other words, the entire scheme aims to exploit some seriously desperate shut-in otaku. (Oh, and for the "just dumb" part? There's an annual intra-group rock paper scissors tournament that takes place AT BUDOKAN).

Of course, as much as it's exploiting the audience, AKB is almost certainly exploiting the girls in the group. Unlike the Wu-Tang, AKB members haven't shown much ability to move into productive solo careers, even as they (Menudo-style) get shuffled out of the main group as they get older. Some go into the older-skewing SDN48, but others take, well, less conventional paths. Most dramatic is Rina Nakanishi, who now works in Adult Video under the pseudonym Yamaguchi Riko. Note, this is not softcore or private sex-tape stuff, but actual hardcore porn starring a former member of the currently most succesful pop group in the country. Of course, the path to that outcome was well paved, since the girls of AKB are trained primarily in dance and dress-up, including donning skimpy clothes for photo shoots, sometimes from a very young age. Not that I'm against half-naked women in principle (or for that matter, totally naked ones), but the unremitting focus on youth is pretty icky - for instance, the video for the new SDN single has them all in schoolgirl outfits, which is standard through the AKEmpire.

Finally, just to reiterate, none of this is anything but a total disaster for Japanese fans or the quality of culture. The core fanbase of socially maladjusted and detached Akiba nerds has resulted in music that would seem to be targeted at children if it weren't for all the overblown synth and sexual innuendo (So, half-deaf, horny children). Ian Martin of the Japan Times makes the apropos comparison to the Korean band Girl's Generation, who while still managed to within an inch of their lives, are also quite clearly being given better music to work with. Pop is pop, no doubt, and maybe America has been spoiled over the past - what, forty-five years? - by the constant availability of some slight counternarrative amidst the pap, whether it was Kate Bush and Blondie cropping up inexplicably in the Eighties or the more recent likes of Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga (whose music is disposable but who is at least genuinely opinionated, provocative, and let's just say it, gay). What exactly is it that has kept Japanese pop so docile and irrelevant for so long? The more I learn about it, the more I believe it has something to do with the hierarchical nature of the music business . . . and the more I wonder how long this crap can survive the internet, however clever the branding structure.

Dipset Trance Party: Witchhouse Without Prejudice

2011-07-20T04:34:00.000-07:00

As the kids say I've got this "On Blast," after reading about it way late in the game in a review of AraabMuzik's new album. It's absolutely gold from beginning to end, dark and electronic and hyperactive and grimy/shiny, full of cheap-sounding drums that'll puncture your eardrums.

Dipset Trance Party

The greatest/weirdest part, though, is that it basically sounds like the best Witch House compilation imaginable - like what would happen if Salem actually knew what the fuck they were doing, Holy Other lost all that dreary self-reflexivity, and Pictureplane stripped away his melodic hooks in favor of raw chunks of emotive horn stab.

James Blake in Japan: How to Import An Enigma

2011-07-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

Update 7/24/2011: A friend told me that the Tokyo radio station J-Wave plays James Blake "all the time." They did, at least at one point - "Limit to your Love" peaked at 47 on the Tokio Hot 100 back in February.

A friend just let me know about the fantastic and fascinating article "Japan in Japan: Notes on an Aspect of the Popular Music Record Industry in Japan," by Toru Mitsui (Popular Music, Vol. 3, Producers and Markets (1983), pp. 107-120). It's a detailed and well-informed description of, first, Japanese labels' practices in the late 1970s and early 1980s with regards to the import of foreign records, and second, of the popularity of the English band Japan in the early 1980s. Though of course not quite current, it's a great window into the subtle processes that can dictate how culture travels between modern societies.

What Mitsui primarily focuses on is the fact that by the 1970s, bidding wars between Japanese labels had made artists already well-known in the West progressively less profitable as higher and higher royalties and advances were promised. This led to Japanese labels more aggressively scouting unknown international talent, who still held a broad appeal for the Japanese market. Particularly interesting to me is that Japan were essentially an art-rock band, but they managed to attract a teenybopper audience in Japan because of their heavily made-up, androgynous image. This audience supported them through three early albums that didn't sell particularly well in England or America. David Sylvian, once a member of Japan, is now one of the leading avant-garde musicians in the West, a position he might not have achieved without the financial support of the Japanese market.

Cases of bands not popular in their home turf succeeding wildly in Japan are so common they've become a cliche. Mitsui cites the early success of Kiss in Japan, and the paradigm case is the band Mr. Big, who are essentially unknown in the West but still tour incessantly in Japan.

More recently, there's the case of James Blake. My general impression is that while he's become quite well known in the U.K., he's definitely a niche product in the U.S., pushed by fringe indie websites like Pitchfork and Gorilla vs. Bear. In Japan, while still not a star, his extremely bleak and fairly abstract album has reached the 70th spot on the Oricon album charts since its release about six weeks ago (I'm really wishing I had a full Oricon subscription right now). According to an interview with Ele-King, his import singles were selling out back in February, the kind of thing that builds great buzz for a domestic release. That qualifies him to represent a sort of indie/underground version of the more thoroughly dominant, but also clearly more straightforwardly marketable, likes of Kiss and Mr. Big.

Courtesy Kishimen

It's not entirely clear why or how this happened. He's backed here by the Universal International label, but there aren't overwhelming signs of where that power is going. He's had prominent listening station placement in Tower Shibuya, but that's not something that requires a major label's backing. He was recently featured on the cover of Sound and Recording magazine, a very prominent magazine but hardly directed at the masses of people buying records. It's hard to argue that the music itself is in tune with the "Japanese market" as a whole, since that's overrun with a pestilence of throwaway pop that seems, at least superficially, to be satisfying public demand.

This may have been one moment of a trend I would like to substantiate. What if, as the music industry as a whole declines (and it is declining in Japan, albeit more slowly than in the U.S.), artists who people are more deeply invested in decline less steeply than more disposable pop? What if owning an album like "James Blake" is more intimately tied up with identity creation than owning an AKB48 record? And of course, that's where my little hypothesis breaks down, because it's undeniable that the otaku gain a great deal of identity from their purchase (sometimes en masse) of AKB records and merchandise. The fact that it is inherently less valuable and interesting than James Blake, that these people are building their identities on sand, doesn't seem to make their activities any less persistent over time. In that context, the question shifts - we have to ask not, "What made this strange James Blake record successful?" but the rather more depressing, "What kept this excellent James Blake record from being a much, much bigger success?"

Red Bandana Lab, Ochiai Soup, 7/2/2011

2011-07-03T22:36:00.000-07:00

Had a really fantastic time Saturday at Soup, normally a home for experimental music, this time more focused on political messages and satire. The first act was a Ukelele/drag singer. The prominence of broad drag on the Japanese radical left is something I've only just really noticed, and I haven't quite processed it. It's particularly interesting because the same scene is home to a higher-than-normal concentration of transgendered people. It was a lot of fun and in good humor, but still I wonder how those in the audience (a couple) felt about seeing this:

The main attraction was Red Bandana Lab, who I knew from their appearances at numerous sound demos going back years. They really blew me away, both with their otherworldly track selections and MC Yuso's furious styles.

The event attracted a huge swath of Tokyo's radical left.

Kei of Irregular Rhythm Asylum

Taku from Shirouto no Ran

Photographer Goso Tominaga. I wrote a mini-essay for a book of his pictures coming out sometime in the fall.

In conclusion, stay away from awamori, that stuff is dangerous.

Event Announcement: Understanding (and improving) Independent Music in Japan

2011-07-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

From The Ground Up: Possibilities and Obstacles for Independents in the Japanese Music Industry

A conversation with Hiroki Sakaida of Pop Group Records

Toukyou Geijitsu Daigaku (Geidai), Kitasenju Campus, Lecture Room 1, 18:30-20:00, Tuesday January 12th

[I've put together a fairly informal event for next week, and I sincerely hope you can attend. Information follows.]

In 2005 Hiroki Sakaida independently produced and released “Kaikoo,” a DVD chronicling the activities of a group of hip hop and electronic artists in Tokyo. Building on the huge success of that release, he founded Pop Group records, which has become the home to a wide variety of artists, from hip hop to punk rock and R & B. Pop Group’s aim and philosophy is to introduce innovative artists with an exploratory spirit into the Japanese mainstream. With an entrepreneurial ethos and constant eye for new channels that can carry the label’s message, Sakaida has grown the business consistently over the last five years, including establishing the annual Kaikoo festival.

However, considerable obstacles face efforts to operate outside the traditional channels of the Japanese music business. Many independent artists perceive an “indie glass ceiling,” a limit to success due largely to the cozy relationships between mass channels, such as television, and powerful artist management companies and large labels. Independent labels such as Zankyou and Rose that have launched the careers of successful artists, but such cases seem comparatively rarer than in, for example, the post-Nirvana U.S. music market, where the route from indie to major is more well-worn.

In an informal conversation format, Sakaida will discuss his experience founding and expanding an independent label in Japan, and consider how infrastructure, policy, and culture have impacted his efforts to champion new aesthetics. We will attempt to draw lessons from his experience about what changes to these conditions, if any, might make it easier to foster and spread adventurous Japanese popular music.

The conversation will be in Japanese, with English translation available as needed.

Sleep of Ages - Hercules Against the Moon

2011-07-02T14:18:00.001-07:00

Sleep of Ages - Hercules Against the Moon-Men by Sleep Of Ages

I've been trawling Soundcloud (or is that trolling?) while I do a last mad set of JLPT drilling. This track in particular jumped out at me. Of course, if you're not into noise, it's unlikely to connect, so enter at your own risk.

Glaciers of Ice: "DUBWIS6"

2011-06-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

DUBWIS6 by Glaciers of Ice

I am legitimately proud of this. I haven't got a clue how it happened.

Does it count as 'self promotion' if it's on my own blog?

Characterizing the Japanese Music Industry

2011-06-27T02:42:00.000-07:00

I've been trying lately, as I move toward the end of my time in Japan (for now) to do a little summing up - to think about what I've learned, how I can structure it meaningfully, and what holes I want to plug before I leave. Much of what I've learned revolves around the daily lives of musicians, but I want to place that within the broader context of the general conditions within which they're working. So what can I say about Japan as a context for the production of music? As an initial stab, the Japanese situation is one of:

1. Intense stratification and hierarchical control. For musicians who want to reach a mass audience, there are no strong alternatives to the major labels and management companies. For a variety of reasons (including strong-arm tactics by dominant management companies and, just maybe, high-level ties to organized crime), it is almost impossible to access television except through these channels. Where in the U.S. we've become used to seeing independent musicians on late-night talk shows, hearing their music on commercials, etc, there's no real equivalent to this in Japan. Meanwhile, for musicians who bow to the structure, management companies tightly control their talent (even those with genuine musical talent), approving and limiting their releases as well as non-music projects.

Do you really even need to listen to this?

2. Partly as a result, there is Palpable Contempt for Mass Audiences. This is not a cultural constant - Japanese pop music from the sixties and seventies was of high quality and often aesthetically or culturally progressive. But music of the recent past is simply insulting, pandering to an (admittedly often true) image of mouth-breathing otaku and blandly disinterested housewives. Of course, AKB is the apex of this (the recent CGI affair is only a rather patent manifestation of the plasticine idiocy they represent), but it's everywhere - teenage girls singing meaningless lyrics over cookie-cutter tracks. Even artists who use visuals promising something interesting usually . . . aren't.

3.Thorough Domestication, at least at the top. The very biggest Western artists still get some traction (for instance, currently, Lady Gaga), and there is a genuine 'Korean Wave' of bands like Girls Generation. And if you look at the culture more broadly, of course, there's a huge engagement with, in particular, Western (mostly American) pop, rock, jazz, soul, and hip hop from the fifties through nineties. But charts are dominated by domestic artists. This might not be a problem, maybe not even notable, except that this insularity is self-fulfilling in the export market - the failure of the Japanese pop machinery to engage with global aesthetic developments over the last ten years has left Japanese pop relevant abroad only to a marginal, if not exactly small, group of international otaku. Again, this doesn't apply nearly as much to indie and underground acts, for example bands like Boris, Acid Mothers Temple, and Melt Banana who are active, relevant contributors to global music.

This, on the other hand, you might want to actually check on.

4. Tons of Creative Potential in the form of artists who can't find the audiences they deserve. Obviously, in my perfect world, this would include the array of super weird stuff that I love the most, from Origami's abstract hip hop to EYE's weirdo psychedelic worldbeat techno. More realistically, there are tons of creative but very accessible artists, like Chinza Dopeness, the singer UA, instrumental beatmakers Hifana - the list goes on and on - who labor in relative obscurity because so much of the market is dominated by manufactured pap.

5. A Hugely Sophisticated Live Music Network covering the entire country. Tokyo is a brutal place to play music, as many venues of any size impose ticket minimums on bands, who often effectively end up having to pay to play. It's musical neoliberalism - offloading financial risk to the bottom rung of the ladder. But the benefit to audiences is huge, as the greater security afforded to clubs helps them last longer than in the U.S., making it worthwhile to install truly spectacular sound systems.

6. Limited Internet Channels for marketing and distribution. Though digital downloads via keitai (mobile phones) are a huge revenue stream for major labels, this is a tightly controlled structure and not open to independent artists. At the same time, Japanese independent labels don't have the profusion of engaged blogs that are now taken for granted in America and the rest of the West - at least, I haven't found them, and everyone I talk to says they're not a major force in music marketing. There is a major exception in the website Ele-King, which is making a bid to be Japan's Pitchfork, but a) it focuses disproportionately on international music and b) the very fact that Pitchfork is so clearly its model makes it outdated. That's because blogs featuring mixes and downloads are more relevant and effective for breaking obscure bands - and in case you haven't noticed, that's what I'm really talking about here - the conditions for indie bands to have an impact. (It bears mentioning that Ustream is vastly more important here than in the West - Ele-King is actually part of the same company as Dommune, a tiny club that streams all of its events live. I still don't get the impression this compensates for the lack of blogs). Things may be changing here, as some niche-catering sites offering mixes and free downloads have popped up - they're still far from influential, but I'll be posting a bit about them soon.

7. Latent Demand for creative culture. This is the most abstract point, and the most open-ended. In fact, it's more of a question - just how much potential is there for Japanese people to suddenly realize that they're consuming garbage and start pushing some of the nation's deep bench of spectacular bands towards onto the charts? Successful, ambitious independent labels like W + K Tokyo Lab, Rose Records, and my own home base, Pop Group Records, have carved out substantial audiences for themselves, but they're essentially restricted to 'music people,' sophisticates and self-starters who make it to record stores and live houses at least occasionally. This would seem to indicate that, if the industry was freed of the jimushou and their apparent inability to take risks on anything not slickly factory-shat, these artists, with their greater substance and significance, would be able to use the currently strictly-controlled channels of TV and advertising to reach a huge number of potential fans who are now simply unaware of their existence. All the conditions for an early-'90s-America-style 'indie takeover' - except for that uncertain x-factor, public demand.

International Transport Volume 5A - Clean it Up And Dub It

2011-06-20T03:06:00.000-07:00

(The idea behind these mixes - of pointing out little-known American music for Japanese audiences, and vice versa - has been inconsistently executed. But now we're doing it for real - this is part 1 of a matched set, and the second part should go up in no more than a few days. This one's for my Japanese friends.）

International Transport 5 - Clean It Up and Dub It

ここに集まった欧米に作った曲には、最近も、ちょっと前の曲も入ているのに、ほとんどダッブの生気からインスピレーションもらった。Ｔｈｅ　Ｗｅｅｋｎｄは基本的にＲ＆Ｂ，ピーキングラライトスはＩｎｄｉｅ世界から来たん、ＨｏｌｙＯｔｈｅｒは多分テクノと言うんだけど、三つは似ているようにダッブ芸実使う。

俺は最近得にテキサスをはじめアメリカの南から２０００年代に出たヒップホップにはまっている。”Ｓｃｒｅｗ”と言うスタイルは日本にほとんど知られていないけど、最近サイケデリック世界にも音響している。特にＳａｌｅｍというバンドを影響された。スローはキーワード。いわゆる”Ｓｙｒｕｐ”麻薬がこういう雰囲気の作るのに強い影響あった。　”Ｓｔｉｌｌ　Ｔｉｐｐｉｎ’”は私が一番好きのＳｃｒｅｗ風な曲。

ダッブや、Ｓｃｒｅｗ、「ノイズ」もこのミックスの中心です。ＣｌａｍｓＣａｓｉｎｏと言う、日本にまだ知られていないトラックメイカーはノイズだらけ、けどフックも信じられない。同じ用に、ビッグジャッスの「Ｄｅｄｉｃａｔｉｏｎ　２　Ｐｅｏ」はある表面にきれいの逆けど、美しいになる。

Playlist Next

Clams Casino – Motivation

Big Boi – Daddy Fat Sax

Peaking Lights – All the Sun that Shines

Mike Jones – Still Tippin’

The Weeknd – High for This

Big Jus – Dedication 2 Peo

Holy Other – Touch

Three 6 Mafia – Break the Law (Ground Up Mix)

Tyler the Creator – Sandwitches

Tricky – Black Steel

Warpaint – Undertow

Gang Gang Dance - Mindkilla

Glaciers of Ice – Truth Serum

[興味がある人向け：最後の曲俺が作った。]

Best Music Podcasts

2011-06-16T22:52:00.000-07:00

As a city knit together by public transportation and lots of walking, Tokyo has made me more of a podcast junky than ever. And of course, what I'm looking for most of all is music-related stuff. Strangely, there's not exactly a wealth of greatness out there, but here's what I've found:

Sound Opinions (Itunes)

Sound Opinions is the only podcast I've found that actually engages with music, in the deepest sense - talking about it, interviewing musicians, reviewing history, putting things in context, and making critical judgments. It's fantastic that it exists, but it's a shame it's so unique, particularly since its hosts are well into middle age, and while they tend to have a great sense of perspective, they're not very adventurous.

And if I can resurrect an outdated slur, they're the very definition of "rockists."

Gorilla Vs. Bear

Gorilla Vs. Bear is an amazing site, featuring new tracks daily. But my favorite feature is the monthly mix, which compiles the best stuff from their posts. It's a reminder of how nice it is to put your faith in an expert curator, against the current norm of always being your own DJ.

Altered Zones

Most of what goes for GVSB is true here too, except that Altered Zones hosts a series of guest mixers to produce their monthly mix series. Recent standouts include John McEntire and Ford and Lopatin.

Experience Music Project Oral Histories (Itunes)

Not technically a podcast (it's part of ItunesU) but exactly the sort of thing I'd love to see more of - lineup includes conversations with Krist Novoselic and Henry Rollins.

Dublab (Itunes)

A series of live recordings by of-the-minute bands. As the name implies, skews towards downbeat, lo-fi grooves. I can specifically recommend the great set by L.A. Vampires.

XLR8R (Itunes)

A pretty mixed bag, as they frequently (and surprisingly) throw in some rather lame rock, but I still dip into it every once in a while.

You might have noticed this is a rather short list. It defies sense, but there's a genuine dearth of compelling and creative music podcasts. If you have other suggestions, post them in the comments!

Japanese Horror-Ween 3: Kazuo Umezu

2011-06-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

This is roughly my 200th post at Minds Like Knives - I have several unpublished drafts that Blogger counts as posts, so I can't be quite sure, but since I'm excited about this post (as opposed to the alcohol reviews preceding it) let's call it number 200. Yaaaaaay! Now on to the dismemberment.

I doubt he dressed like this in the fifties.
Or for that matter, the eighties.

Kazuo Umezu is a weird one - not just a weird guy, though he would seem to be that, but a weird career arc, which somehow links into the weird arc of Japanese culture over the last fifty years. His first well-known work, and still considered something of a minor classic, is Nekome Kozo, or Cat-Eyed Boy. It's a spooky but fairly innocent story about a supernatural child who goes around bumping into ghosts and spiders and assorted lighthearted symbols of the weird and scary, in a halloween-childish sort of way. It's honestly not to far from what you'd imagine Miyazaki would come up with if he was contracted to write a "ghost story."

But as time went on, Umezu was given the opportunity - maybe even the impetus - to explore some profoundly dark places. I recently picked up 'Kami no Hidari-te Akuma no Migi-te' ('God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand'), and it contains three of the more deeply unnerving stories I've come across this side of Lovecraft. Moreover, these are stories that, if not actually intended for children, maintain (intentionally or not) many of the tropes of children's literature, leaving the adult reader with the impression that they've come across something that quite possibly deserves to be banned or burned - except it's four decades too late.

This is the first page of 'Kami no Hidari-te.' It requires a little context - you see, this is a nine year old girl getting her eyes gouged out by a pair of scissors from the inside. It turns out this is a dream sequence, but generally Umezu doesn't pussyfoot or dodge the disturbing elements of his stories. Most notably, the second story in 'Kami' begins with the totally unprovoked plot of a group of third graders to brutally murder their teacher so they can "see her true character" after she dies. Child characters prove themselves capable of astonishing violence again and again in this book - sometimes heroic, just as often cruel and malicious. And even the 'heroic' acts are often justified in ways that would get real-world kids locked up - for instance, setting a bear trap in a woman's car because of something seen in a dream.

The grotesque sequences just keep coming, and if you've got a taste for artful shock, they alone will keep you engrossed. For instance, while it's been done to death since (see Stephen King's cockroaches), one might consider these sequences of full-body spider infestation visionary.

What elevates 'Kami no Hidari-te' beyond mere shock, though, is the narrative surrealism. In many cases, the conciets are hard to summarize, which in my book is an endorsement. In the first of the three stories, an extended set piece revolves around the idea that 1) a young girl is being possessed by the vengeful spirits of murdered children, 2) the inside of her body has become a battle ground between those children's murderers and the young girl's brother, who is some kind of dream-warrior, and 3) the dead children are ejecting everything from newspapers to tricycles through her into the world, without killing her.

It's gory to an almost mind-numbing extreme, but the plot keeps things moving along and never allows any image to get stale. The same effect holds throughout the book, especially in the third story, which involves the genuinely surreal and delightfully unexplained flexibility of the boundary between dream and reality. The protagonist (the same young boy from the first two stories) at one point enters a dream state, transforms into a crow to kill a spider-queen by ripping her tongue out, and then awakes to spit out the mangled corpse of a spider.

And as I said, what's most insane about all of this is that it relies so heavily on conceits that imply that the intended audience is preteen. The same young boy character (Sou, meaning roughly "idea") is the protagonist of all the stories. His older sister never believes him when he says he's seen something (in a dream or reality, which ultimately become interchangeable), and adults, similarly, seem to distrust something about him. Both of these (like the inarticulate adults of 'Peanuts') seem intended to appeal to actual ten year old boys. Sometimes the kid protagonist is actually right, but then there's also the time that he murders his third-grade teacher, in the real world, without any remorse or consequences.

In short, if it was ever actually intended for children, this is a deeply fucked up book.

If we're talking about adults, though, it's amazing and highly recommended. This is a recent reprint, with this kickass day-glo cover and a lot of rich and varied partial to full color schemes scattered on the newsprint within. It's a fat book, but even with my middling Japanese it's a pretty quick read (and that's actually another disturbing point, because the simplicity of the language seems to have too-young readers at least partially in mind). Ultimately, if you're sick in the head and enraptured by monsters, death, infestation, mutation, and body trauma, this is an absolute must-have.

YoYo-C: Yokohama Reggae

2011-06-07T21:32:00.001-07:00

A recommendation straight from Rumi, a nice bit of rootsy reggae from Yokohama's YoYo-C:

Booze Views: Sparx

2011-06-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

Sadly, there's no direct relation between this beauty and the similarly-named, now-dead-to-me American caffiene-booze cocktail. But they are spiritual brothers, with the shared aim of getting drinkers as quickly and thoroughly messed as possible. At 9% alcohol, this is basically like drinking two Chu-hi at once, with fewer weird stares from the other people at Hello Work.

The tradeoff, of course, is that you can taste the grain alcohol seeping out from behind the chemically-generated Lemon Pledge like some flavor tech's unsuccessfully repressed unconscious memory of an alcoholic absentee father. Drinkable, but only if you have a robust and durable sense of self-worth.

Booze Views: Cocktail Partner - Mango and Orange

2011-06-07T20:21:00.000-07:00

The name of this concoction is deceptive for several reasons. It's not a cocktail 'partner,' since it already contains booze - it's just a 'cocktail'. Second, while it emphasizes its fruitiness, it only contains 2.8% fruit juice (if you're annoyed by 'fruit cocktails' in the U.S., Japan is ten times worse about that sort of nonsense).

And finally, this drink is only a partner to you, the drinker, in the sense that Ike was Tina Turner's "partner." While the initial sweetness may be beguiling, it's all going to get messy later.

The first noticeable thing is a bitter, tonic-y, almost medicinal taste. It's not overtly disgusting, it's just so utterly fake you'd be as well off pouring Everclear into Kool-Aid.

That said, I finished the whole can.

Booze Views: Umeshu Jelly

2011-06-03T20:16:00.000-07:00

All you need to know about this abomination is that it says you should "Shake Before Drinking."

Why, God? Why would you visit such punishment upon mankind? Umeshu itself is a mixed blessing - a plum wine/liqueur that's very delicious and very sweet, like a more natural version of a wine spritzer. It's enjoyable like Diablo II - after a couple of fun hours you're going to feel really bad about yourself.

So anyway, Jelly. It's one of the weirder trends in Japanese drinks, alcoholic and otherwise. People who don't read Japanese are at some point certain to end up with something that looks like grape juice, sports drink, or even cola, and find their first sip full of what feels like curdled milk.

In short, as with most of mankind's sufferings, this is one we have visited upon ourselves. Drinking this is a reminder that I could live in Japan for a decade and there are still things I would never understand. It's also very tempting to see it as a sign that the Japanese are, as a nation and a people, of the devil.

Booze Views: Calpis Makkori

2011-06-01T19:59:00.000-07:00

I keep things pretty serious around here, so reviews of alcoholic drinks may seem too ephemeral. But let's not forget that this is actually an incredibly depressing subject! You see, I am a deeply flawed human being. Along with billions of others, I deal with my imperfection by periodically blunting my consciousness, papering over the cracks in my own facade with a pleasant haze. In Japan, this is most often done with booze - and as perhaps the world's most consumerist society, booze comes in a dizzying and ever-changing spectrum of varieties and flavors. Won't you come with me, then, for some help in choosing how to reconcile yourself to the inherent contradictions of postmodern risk society?

Say hello to Calpis Makkori, the very idea of which is revolting. Calpis is a Gatorade-esque amino-restorative sports drink, and makkori is a milky-white Korean rice liquor, like a thicker version of sake. Makkori has made a huge play for the Japanese booze market lately, reflecting the ongoing, broad "Korean Wave" that has included an incredibly diversity of kimchee brands, bibinba fixings made fresh in every supermarket, and (let's not forget) a seemingly bottomless love of Korean pop stars and actors.

Surprisingly, once you get over the idea of drinking alcohol-laced baby formula, this becomes a cheerful suggestion that another, more harmonious world is possible. It's flat, sweet, and surprisingly fruity. Could be a good summer jam.

New Glaciers of Ice: "Low (inst)"

2011-06-01T19:21:00.000-07:00

Low (inst) by Glaciers of Ice

What may superficially look like a fun side project or even a "hobby" insidiously links back to my professional life. Making music isn't just important in its own right, but is also a way to better understand the musicians that I write about. But as I get better at it myself, these rationalizations and diversions become less and less important.

More from Zettai-Mu: Live Hip Hop Band Camelback

2011-05-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

Affiliates of the Black Smoker label. (Caution - AWESOME website)

Why Isn't Chiyori Famous? or, a Grainy Endoscopy of the Japanese Music Industry

2011-05-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

I have plenty to say here, but let's let her speak for herself first, in this video from a performance last night at a small club called Bed in Ikebukuro (Western Tokyo):

So, now you'll have at least some small sense of where I'm coming from. This is a woman with gifts in the realm of an Amy Winehouse or Adele (admittedly, this video doesn't quite do those justice), but with a fierce and unique, subtle strangeness that she seems barely aware or in control of (a fact this particular song does highlight). The question is, why is she playing a tiny club like Bed, after putting out a full-length album on a relatively high-profile indie, and putting in years worth of work building a series of events and nights (including this monthly event, Zettai-Mu, itself)? As she said herself when I walked in last night, Bed is "a pretty ghetto club," though in Tokyo that means more 'marginal and cheap' than 'sketchy and dangerous' (You can read her blog here (Japanese), and hear a few more polished recordings here).

In fact, I had a far better time there last night than I did on Friday at Air, which had a vastly superior soundsystem, some great DJs, and all the personality and atmosphere of a Soviet pharmacy. Air is one of what I would call Tokyo's "listening clubs," places including Daikanyama Unit, WWW in Shibuya, and Liquidroom. They have the most mind-bogglingly incredible sound systems (I'm willing to bet) of any club their size on the planet. And they're all beautiful. But they cater to an aggressively upscale trendy market (editors note: decidedly not a 'hipster' market, but young professionals). They most often feel like a collection of strangers, though there are exceptions (for instance, when Liquidroom hosts smaller events in its upstairs lounge).

On the other hand, there are smaller places, quite literally on the outskirts, like Heavy Sick Zero in Nakano, Bed in Ikebukuro, or Family, which is able to exist in Shibuya only because it's literally the size of my apartment. These clubs host smaller, sometimes stranger, always more amateurish shows, for crowds that tend to be more intimate. They're also usually cheaper (entrance to Bed on Saturday was 1/2 to 1/3 the charge for Air on Friday, even though Air was basically just a DJ night and Bed had three bands).

And that's where Chiyori has focused her energy for years - not on the large clubs that could put her in front of rich cool kids, but on the margins, where posters are peeling off the black-painted walls and anti-Japanese kung fu movies from the 1970s play on monitors over the bar and someone will sell you jerk chicken off a hot plate for 500 yen (and the chicks will actually smile at you). Her immense raw talent and creativity hasn't in and of itself propelled her out of these locales over the past three years. There's no telling what will happen from here, but I hope I'm not alone in finding it confounding that she's not made it further already. When I interviewed her late last year, her tone was of cheerful bittersweetness - she at first said that she'd given up the dream, which she's had since she was a child, of becoming a conventional Japanese 'idol.' Then she smiled shyly and admitted she hadn't actually - not quite.

There are many reasons why I fear her hopes, however shy, will not be fulfilled. Though she's far from unattractive, she's not one of the conventionally tiny and pixie-cute girls who gets transformed into autotune queens of garbage pop. And she's so far been committed to an aesthetic that's not hugely marketable - a blend of roots reggae and balladry that doesn't even fit into Japan's hyperactive dancehall/beach reggae market, much less its piston-through-the-temple pop charts. Despite having none of the trappings of a b-girl, she also has a deep commitment to hardcore hip hop, dating back to her early work with DJ Muta of MSC (Japan's answer to the Wu-Tang Clan, and that's not a comparison made lightly).

So, she has put some barriers up for herself - or, more to the point, she knows who she is (poison for a great many music careers). But there's also the Japanese music industry itself. 20 years after "Nevermind," it may be hard for most in the U.S. to understand, but there simply isn't a path for the transition from 'indie to major' such as that now so well-worn by U.S. bands like, most recently, the Arcade Fire. Even the rare truly creative artist to make it onto a Japanese major label (for instance, the reminiscent-of-Bjork, friend-of-the-Boredoms singer UA) have made it through the almost superhuman process of sublimating themselves to the structure of the majors for the duration of their careers, and then eventually gaining the power to pursue their own desires, as opposed to enjoying the freedom of exploration until they were mature and polished enough to warrant signing to a major.

Chiyori, by choosing to work outside what basically amount to musical zaibatsu, has placed herself under a glass ceiling (which doesn't have much particularly to do with gender). There are a growing number of "major indies," including Pop Group and W+K Tokyo (which is actually an EMI subsidiary, but still does some interesting things). These offer at least a small number of creative musicians the opportunity to actually live off their music, which after years of investigation I've concluded is a grim near-impossibility in Japan. Almost every musician I truly respect here works a day job, and these are people in their late 20s and early 30s. Chiyori, the tremendously gifted singer you just listened to, works in a photo printing shop. Partly this is a matter of scale - in the U.S., there is simply a bigger audience to share, and more artists able to really make a go of it. But it is also true that, as hard as this may be to believe, Japan's charts are even more full of manufactured garbage than those in the U.S., the product of management companies with intimate ties to TV producers and no particular motivation to foster artists capable of writing and producing their own songs, since most of these so-called jimushou profit hugely from their control of publishing.

And this is what you end up with - profoundly gifted people playing for appreciative but tiny audiences, unable to fully devote themselves to what they love, and leaving a whole nation poorer for it.

The Second Lost Generation - The Story of One Wandering Japanese Engineer

2011-05-27T02:39:00.000-07:00

At first it might not seem that cataclysmic that only 90.1 percent of Japanese college grads had jobs lined up on graduation. But the current slump is likely to create a "lost generation" in which large numbers of probably high achievers are completely or largely locked out of the conventional job market, and forced into part-time, temporary, or international work. That's because of a hiring system that only gives seekers one shot - in the period just after they graduate. Those who either want to take some time off, or who slip through the hiring cracks despite a sincere effort, are out of luck. I spent about eight months after my (alread unconventionally late) graduation living on a friends' couch, substitute teaching, then hitchhiking across the U.S. and travelling in Mexico. If I had been Japanese, I'd have been screwed.

I had a brief conversation last night with a guy who has actually had to leave Japan twice for economic reasons. He was part of a previous 'lost generation' of the mid-1990s, and had ended up living and working in New Jersey for several years as a young man, including being in the National Guard, which he told me was a possibility for permanent residents - news to me. This is of course pretty adventurous, and he seemed like he'd banked some pretty amazing experiences, but what he wasn't doing during the most dynamic phase of his life was contributing to Japanese economy and society.

He did eventually get back to Japan and, with the experience accrued (in engineering) in America, got a job with the Japanese arm of a European company. And then came the Lehmann shock, and the Tokyo office got folded and combined with the Shanghai branch. So he was back on his ass, and subsequently couldn't find work for a year. Now he's doing some (frankly illegal) entrepreneuring, running a company that scans books from Amazon Japan for use on e-readers, since there is as yet no e-book market there. He had imported a Kindle from the U.S. (which I've seen before but this time particularly struck me as impressive) and clearly had a lot to offer in terms of insight and innovation to Japanese society. Unfortunately (as confirmed by the small anarchist bar where I ran into him) he's now been almost totally relegated to the fringes, where it's unlikely he'll have an easy path to making those contributions.

In the economic tumult following Japan's largest natural disaster, there will be more like my new friend, having to improvise to survive outside of the mainstream of Japanese business culture. The question is whether there will be any more second chances for them, or any new effort by the nation to make the most of its infamously dwindling workforce.

Photo Roundup: Nikko

2011-05-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

Late last week I took a quick trip to Nikko, famous for its monkeys, hot springs, and an ornate shrine to the Tokugawa Shogunate.

The monkey thing is real. Unfortunately it seems like contact with humans has not been great for their dispositions - just moments after I took this photo, these monkeys were aggressively harassing and chasing a woman in her sixties. Hard to imagine anything more terrifying.

I stayed in the upper part of Nikko, near lake Chuzenji. It was quiet, and I mostly focused on hiking around the lake and seeing some of the amazing natural sights. This is a deservedly well-known waterfall.

It has generally been my experience that Japanese hiking trails are amazingly treacherous. The trail on the southern edge of the lake was no exception, requiring borderline mountaineering.

It was more than worth it though, partly thanks to the amazing weather and greenery exploding everywhere.

The sakura were even still in bloom, just beginning to shower pink petals.

There was a steady traffic flow, moving just behind me across the bridge I was standing on when I took this.

One of an amazing series of six panels in one of the shrines in Nikko's main complex. A friendly Japanese guy helped me with the info - they were painted in the 1970s by a guy named Yaneda Hiroshi, but sadly I haven't been able to find anything else about him.

There's a small, 400 year old garden within the temple complex. It was really sublime, got me thinking about how we need to refigure our ideas of what constitutes "art" so it can more easily encompass achievements like this.

One final shot from within the Tokugawa tomb. I can't recommend it enough - it's full of weird, unique stuff like this candalabra, objects and architectural gestures that achieve the rare feat of being more than just 'representative' of Japan, and move into the realm of unique art. It's a shame that it required totalitarianism to get that done, but maybe that's just Japan for you.

Regarding Workers

2011-05-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

I took the above photo a couple of days after the 3.11 earthquake, mainly to illustrate the amazing speed with which Tokyo returned to everyday normality. The guy in the middle is just one subtype of an eternal Tokyo presence - the sidewalk promoter. He's giving out flyers (and probably tissue packages) to promote a contact lens shop, but you'll also see people doing much the same work in service of Italian restaurants, Karaoke boxes, manga kissaten, Korean barbecues, and hostess clubs (including the vile subspecies who harass passing young women to try and lure them into the sex industry).

I've lately been thinking about how little I understand the human element of a job like this. It's just one of a variety of undeniably crappy jobs you see people doing every day in a city like Tokyo, from fast-food server to Donki clerk to construction-site traffic-director. The last time I worked a job of this sort was about a year ago, when I did short stints as a parking-lot attendant and line-cook as part of my confused attempts to deal with unexpected funding shortfalls in my last year of grad school. Both were part-time jobs, and the line cook job was actually a hell of a lot of fun, but I ended up quitting both jobs with no notice in moments of frustration and/or overwork.

I had that option, because I knew I was on my way to other things, but I was nonetheless able to hold onto some (facile, superficial) sense of solidarity with "workers," thanks to my cushioned, provisional version of poverty, and the genuinely merciless grind of grad school, in some ways undeniably more demanding and even exploitative than this sort of service job.

Now, though, I'm realizing how much that illusion of lived solidarity was insulating me from a real consideration of the challenges posed by living in a mercilessly stratified society. Job-wise, I'm now living a ridiculous fantasy, which if not quite financially secure does happen to include total freedom. I'm suddenly not sure how to feel about the legions of workers through whom I float, to whose daily struggle I find it more and more difficult to truly relate.
Being a fake-poor student helped me ignore - emotionally, if not intellectually - the role of luck and privilege in helping me along my path. I was raised in a solid household, my parents have been able to give me a small amount of financial help, and perhaps most importantly, they instilled in me a huge degree of self-confidence. And of course, let's not forget that I've now milked white privilege on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

This makes my feelings about the tissue distributor pretty difficult and complicated. Not infinitely complicated - every single person who has to work a job they hate is a victim of shortcomings in our society. And I consider it my obligation as someone who has dodged that bullet to work for improving the system, even if at present that takes the form of a rather indirect effort to oppose fascistic tendencies in pop culture.

But on the other hand, it's a challenge to think about people as victims of society without dehumanizing them to at least some degree. Each person must make their own choices, choices which are expressions (or, less tritely, constitutions) of who they are. In terms of interpersonal relationships, noone wants to be pitied, with its inevitable condescension. That's been one vital discovery of my research on music - at least some small minority of these people are doing these shit jobs by choice, because work is not the most important thing in their lives, and they are actually able to be happy without having "proper" careers. (This is, incidentally, just a slightly more direct version of a quandary that paralyzes some media theorists - how do you indict the mind-control-like powers of media while still leaving plenty of space for the agency of individual interpretation and critical reading?)

Nonetheless, there's one powerful, undeniable reality - my own frequently recurring guilt whenever I interact with someone in this sort of job. It's the same sensation I felt recently when listening to This American Life chronicling five job candidates desperately hoping to land a $20,000 a year telemarketing gig. One twenty-year-old's ecstasy at being hired was deeply uncomfortable for me to listen to (as I think the producers intended, as their audience is probably largely composed of people who feel the same way). The distance between me and these people is so huge, and while I certainly am not without constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety over my precarious career, all signs point to the gap growing even further in the coming years. While I've pretty well traversed/dodged the grinding gears of capitalism, these are people who are pummeled by them daily. After nearly a decade of (posh, drunken, student-variety) poverty, I'm finding the transition into the middle class impossibly bittersweet.

This guilt is distinct from our feelings towards the destitute or homeless, because there is no easy way to alleviate it - there is no equivalent, for the working class, to going to work at the soup kitchen or donating old coats. Because these are not people who have 'fallen through the cracks' in a way that we can patch up piecemeal. These people are the very fabric and foundation, essential parts of the way society is actually supposed to be (and I'm by no means suggesting that Tokyo freeters are the abused bottom of the global barrel). They are essential to capitalism, in both senses. If we regard them as tragic, we can't hold back from making the same judgment of our society as a whole.

Food Fetish: Nikko, Yuba, and Localism in Japanese Junk Food

2011-05-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of last week I spent a couple of days in Nikko, a nice relaxing solo trip. I made a point of eating every variety of the local specialty, yuba, that I could get my hands on. Yuba is made from the curd skimmed during the process of making soy milk, and is particularly associated with Nikko because it was a source of protein for the vegetarian yamabushi (mountain monks) that populated its famous shrines (and, in smaller numbers, still do).

It's more appetizing than it sounds, making this a tasty chance to trace an archetype of Japanese food localism. In short, this localism is mostly a marketing strategy aimed at travelers that provides nominal variation while still keeping things comfortably familiar. To wit:

A typical bowl of soba, you say? Not at all - it's yuba soba, transformed by those yellowish rolls. This was the tastiest of the variations I tried, partly because it was eaten in a small restaurant at the end of a five-hour hike.

And again:

Yuba Ramen. Actually a pretty egregious misuse of yuba, since ramen contains copious amount of pork fat and tallow, both completely negating the 'vegetarian' status of the yuba, and overpowering it to boot.

Yuba Teishoku (set lunch). Found this place in the back of a gift shop in the middle of Nikko's shrine/temple complex. This comes across as pretty traditional, though outside of the three varieties of yuba at the center it's relatively indistinguishable from any Japanese set meal.

And here's a yuba croquet - otherwise known as a volume of whipped potato with a basically undetectable paper-thin scrap of yuba in the center, all bread-battered and deep-fried. The humble croquet, by the way, is just one of the omnipresent junk foods that makes Japan's reputation for "healthy" food completely misguided.

Interview: Strotter Inst.

2011-05-15T18:30:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the month, I was lucky enough to get my socks blown off by Strotter Inst, a.k.a. Christoph Hess, a Nordic mad scientist who has modified a series of turntables into some retrgrade form of drum machine, and feeds them fragments of destitute twelve-inch corpses to produce hypnotic industrial polyphony. I was so enthused I took the time to send him a few questions, and he was generous enough to answer them. (All photos courtesy of Strotter's website).

Q: This was your first time to Japan, what did you think about it?

A: I just stayed for one week, but I have had a great time impressed by the whole town, meeting all these nice and friendly people. And it was big fun to play again with SXQ from Tokyo, after we met on a Russian tour in
2008.

Q: Are the audiences here much different than what you’re used to?

A: As I am lucky to play in very different kind of venues and scenes, I'm used to very different audiences. But I had hardly seen such an enthusiastic one like in Tokyo. Another point is the volume the concerts were played and no one was using earplugs...

Q: How long did it take you to develop this technique? Did the idea come to you all at once, or did you start out doing more conventional turntable performance?

A: To play like I'm doing was just good luck. Cause back in the 80s I used to listen a lot to noise and industrial music. But the records were often limited or too expensive for me to buy. So I tried to cut out the grooves of bad pop-vinyls by replacing the diamond of my old turntable by a sewing-needle. It didn't work really, but by doing this there were suddenly quite interesting tunes I could listen to. So I went on trying
different ways of treating and manipulating. Since then every time I play I find new possibilities. Before I never thought of becoming a musician.

Q: How much are you improvising, and how much of each performance is, more or less, orchestrated?

A: That depends much on the venue or occasion I am playing. Sometimes I prepare a kind of partitur but its not possible to control everything that happens. Second I try to react on the specific qualities of the space and the PA.

So its half improvised and half orchestrated.

Q: You have a lot of different cartridges that you switch out during a performance. Could you describe some of these? What are the differences between them, and how did you modify them?

A: Whenever I see a turntable someone don't want anymore I take the cartridge. If the needle is still working I use it like that, cause they sound quite different. If they are broken I replace the diamond by sewing needles,
nails, wires, steel-spring etc. As my soldering is quite archaic I never know what happens. By listen to them on different materials or treated vinyls I decide which ones I'm going to use.

Q: What brand of turntables are you using? At first glance I thought they looked a bit older, with those thick platters, but up close they seem pretty nice.

A: I use usually Lenco turntables. They were made in the 70 by a swiss plant, and they were quite famous so I can still find them in flea-markets for a few bucks.

I like them as objects and they are very well made so they bear my - sometimes - rude treatment. Second each Lenco has got the same head-shell, so that I can change them quickly and they fit always.

Third they are constructed with an amp and I can easy plug them to the PA
by the headphone-output.

A: Do you consider the music or the performance to be the more important part of what you do? The sounds are amazing, but there’s also an amazing visual element, just watching the process.

Q: For playing live its always both. The first live impact is as installations, then the sounds start to grab the listeners' attention. The auditive level surpasses the visual one. Therefore, the optical
comprehension of how the sound is generated plays an important role. In
this way its easy to catch the audience...

By recording for a record its just the sound.

A: Is there a particular meaning or idea behind the shirt and tie? It seems it’s a persistent part of your performances.

A: I think the turntables should be the recognized as the musicians. Shirt and tie are a kind of maskerade in a traditional way. By putting it on and off, the start and the end [of the performance] is somehow visualized too.

Q: Musically, much of what you’re doing seems like a sort of primitive techno or electronic dance music. Did you set out to make this sort of sound, or was it a consequence of your method of making music?

A: The basic part of my machinery is turning, which includes repetition as my starting point. In this sense it gets a certain techno-approach. But as I'm playing with several turntables its hardly impossible to trigger them.
For this I think my music is closer to serial or minimal music. I like very much to play with polyrhythmic changing.

Q: I’m very curious about how serious artists make their livings. What do you do professionally?

A: As I have studied architecture I still gain my money by working as a part time employee in an architecture-studio.

Q: Europe is generally regarded as having great funding for the arts. Have you ever benefitted from that?

A: To play out of Europe the Swiss fund Pro Helvetia and the City/Canton Bern support me sometimes. It wouldn't have been possible for me to come to Tokyo without these. They paid me the ticket. As the audience is usually not very big for this kind of music the venues wouldn't be able to pay the
costs.

Q: Finally, would you like to recommend some other artists for readers to check out?

A: It is difficult pick out a few, my likes range from Contemporary Music to Apocalyptic Folk and even Pop...

So I recommend (beside the bands Herpes Ö DeLuxe and Sum Of R, where I am both a member of) following three labels who helped me to bring out my records: Public Guilt, Hinterzimmer Records, Everest Records.

FFTA

2011-05-15T03:48:00.000-07:00

As a way of (deluding myself into thinking that I'm) practicing Japanese, I picked up a couple of Japanese-language video games. One I just started (Referenced above) begins with a forty-minute (at least) narrative sequence. According to wikipedia, the designers of this game were not drug into the streets and beaten to death upon its release. The only possible conclusion is that Wikipedia is, just as has been said for so long, an unreliable resource.

Photo Roundup: May 2011

2011-05-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

A few highlights from the past few weeks:

Melt Banana today, 5/14

A really stunning juggler in Ueno park

A famous mural by Okamoto Taro in Shibuya Station. Apparently the central figure is the inspiration for the apocalyptic robots of the Evangelion cartoons.

Slovenia's most popular rapper, at a small bar in Koenji called One.

Noise and generative video at Soup, Koenji.

BRK(L)N Connections: Hip Hop and Noise and Music and Technology

2011-05-12T01:08:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow from about 7:30 at the fantastic club Superdeluxe, the leftfield rapper Killer Bong teams up with Japanoise stalwart Hair Stylistics – Masaya Nakahara, formerly known as Violent Onsen Geisha – to do . . . something. I’m not sure what. But apparently K-Bong does it pretty frequently, and has performed in the past with a lot of other noise artists. There’s a three-way collaboration coming up in July between Bong, DJ Baku, and Merzbow (more info as it comes my way).

The connection between hip hop and noise is also being mined across the Pacific, where the single hottest rap crew of the moment, OFWGKTA, made a big portion of its bones in affiliation with the underground psych blogosphere, sites like Gorilla Vs. Bear that mainly traffic in spacey drone-pop and the softer-edged, lo-fi, Occidental version of ‘noise.’ Another current example is the group Shabbazz Palaces, who make rap that’s stretchy and dubbed-out enough to sit comfortably next to neo-hippies like Peaking Lights and Grouper.

But this is deeper than any of-the-moment trend. Hip hop and experimental music have been worshipping at each other’s altar since the early eighties, a source traceable backwards not just in the self-conscious path through DALEK, Cannibal Ox, cLOUDDEAD, Kid 606, Dr. Octagon, Maquinquaye, and Bill Laswell* (*figuring out why exactly he’s terrible deserves a separate post), but all over the pop charts and the hearts of the dismissed “old school.”

Here’s Rammellzee’s epic “Exterior Street” (1985)

Yin-Yang Twins "Salt Shaker" (2003), which still basically sounds like Can. I could also have linked J-Kwon’s “Tipsy” (2007), the stupidest extremely weird song I can think of.

And Lil B’s “Motivation” (2011), with Clams Casino mining psych to give us one of the greatest tracks of all time.

Why do these aliens keep surfacing in a genre that we tend to believe we’ve tamed? More than some weird micro-trend that’s kept alive by willful eccentrics, this is the inevitable return of the repressed – hip hop may have gone pop, but at its root are the same forces that have been explored more self-consciously by “art music” in both its conservatory and basement forms. Hip hop is a product of technology as much as of music – its lineage stretches to the turntable and sampler no less than to James Brown and Lee Perry (and there’s no Lee Perry without the reel-to-reel, a.k.a. the turntable before the turntable).

While Morton Subotnick, Robert Moog, and various inventors and entrepreneurs were pushing the boundaries of audio technology, the beatmatchers and backscrathers of the Bronx were encountering and harnessing the potentials that had already been released into the world – new forms of recording, playback, amplification, and (later) sampling and synthesis. But they weren’t just going with the flow – they were breaking things, overloading them, detourning them: the “scratch” is a more radical analog to John Cage’s prepared piano (more radical because it entirely reconceived the purpose of the turntable, though this was itself a repeat of another of Cage’s accomplishments). Add to that the fact that while rapping did derive partly from Jamaican toasting, which derived, along with reggae, from American soul and R&B (and thus has at least a link with rock and roll), another major source was the patter of DJs on southern black radio stations – here again another cultural innovation driven powerfully by technology (for more on this, including some amazing transcriptions of proto-rap from the 1950s, see Roni Sarig’s Third Coast).

There's something here about the relationship between the avante-garde and the everyday. Did experimentalists like Luc Ferrari somehow prepare the way for hip hop? There are, of course, a few direct connections, particularly how much the Bronx loved Kraftwerk. And never underestimate the determination of a music nerd to self-educate, even if they're mired in abject poverty. But I've never read any indication that people like Herc were consciously aware of those developments. The more plausible, and coincidentally much more interesting hypothesis would be that hip hop and noise are parallel outgrowths of our media and technological environment, though certainly inflected by cultural differences. The consequence is that whenever hip hop gets truly self-reflective, it has a strong tendency to turn into noise and go underground. Just about as often, the pop impulse in hip hop forms a channel for the welling up of strange machine artifacts into the mainstream of American life.

5.7 Anti-Nuclear Demo: A Simplistic Message Fuels a Profound Event

2011-05-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

I've already waited too long to set down some version of my very intense experience at Saturday's anti-nuclear rally. The numbers coming back from news organizations paint it as a bit of a disappointment - partly due to rain, partly due to a major victory handed to activists by PM Kan just the day before, in the form of the ordered shutdown of a reactor in central Japan. Speaking strictly for myself, I think the core message of the demo - "No Nukes!" - is almost childishly simple, perhaps distracting from the really constructive project of promoting renewable energy, not to mention the more profound and radical possibilities for overhauling industrial capitalism (perish the thought).

All that aside, this was a transformative event. I came to it as someone who has attended a lot of marches put on by the central organizers of this demo, Shirouto no Ran. They frequently have demo/parties on May Day and generally are interested in poverty issues - but always with a slightly confrontational edge, including a profusion of absurdism and rnoisy music, which helped these marches palpably alienate passersby. This one was different.

All along the route, there were both people who seem to have broken off from the march (as seen here), and those who just happened to be passing by, saw what was happening, and smiled, waved, or in some cases started cheering along. The energy was amazing.

Another great thing was how wide a spectrum of people was represented, from kids to older folks, and not just fringe or freaky people. Many of these people had never participated in this sort of demonstration before.

This is a huge contrast with the regular Shirouto no Ran demo, which is made up largely of punk rockers, dadaists, and other weirdos (not that there weren't some of those here).

I suddenly found myself with a new appreciation for all those slightly alienated May Day marches, whose effectiveness I've always been pretty skeptical of. They were dress rehearsals for this - an issue powerful enough to draw in people, who just need experienced organizers to give them an outlet for their anxiety and anger.

Tiny Steps

2011-05-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

A common sight on the streets of Tokyo is a man, perhaps in his late seventies, shuffling along the sidewalk, taking steps of no more than three or four centimeters at a time, carefully supporting himself first by a bit of wall, then a pole, then a guardrail. They move with an almost unreal slowness as everyone else on the sidewalk streams around them.

Another common sight is women, also in their late seventies or early eighties, bent nearly double by osteoporosis and hanging onto a walker or grocery cart as if to a chariot speeding out of control as they slowly totter down the street.

These are people old enough to have suffered two abuses. Their health can't have been helped by childhoods lived during the postwar years of near-starvation. And their society has changed beneath their feet from one in which social standards still provided some protection for the elderly (if not the more elusive respect that Orientalism imagines) to one seeking to replace familial trust with indequate state support.

Rappers on Earthquake and Recovery

2011-05-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

David Schmidtz - Motivation and Tips for Writing

2011-05-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

There are dozens of great pieces of advice here. Watch it repeatedly. Or if you're as venal as me, skip straight to part two, where Schmidtz does some stunning math - writing enough can net you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in additional salary.

Evil's Advocate: Why Nike's Miyashita Park is a Good Thing

2011-04-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

I consider myself a leftist, but there are a lot of pieties and givens on the left that I don't quite swallow whole. In fact, I sometimes find myself sketching positions that are at least contrarian, if not retrograde. The thing is, I wish someone would convince me that I'm wrong about these fleeting hints of conservatism. This is the first installment of a new occasional series, Evil's Advocate, in which I invite friends of the blog to tell me exactly why my thought crimes against progressive ideology are misguided.

After years of organized opposition to its extensive reconstruction, Shibuya's Miyashita Park has finally re-opened. It's a tiny strip of elevated land parallel to JR Shibuya station. Prior to the renovations, the park was a typically depressing Japanese park, not much but packed dirt, some playground equipment so dilapidated I wouldn't let any child of mine within ten yards of it, and about two dozen permanent homeless residents. Now, it has become . . . this:

So, how could this transformation from moribund and dreary to active and useful be a bad thing? The root problem for hundreds of activists who have spent a lot of energy opposing the changes seems to have been that they're all planned and executed, not by Shibuya City, but by Nike. Initially, Nike was to pay the city a large sum of money each year for a decade for the right to officially rename it "Miyashita Nike Park." Through demonstrations and direct action, the activists seem to have successfully stopped the renaming - when I went yesterday, there was no Nike branding on any signage, all of which simply said "Miyashita Park." Even though this seems to have been the activists' only real victory, it's not a small one - for park users and residents to have it constantly shoved in their faces that Nike had essentially taken over a public park would have certainly had insidious long-term effects on whatever slim awareness of the idea of public space may remain in Tokyo.

But without the imposition of corporate ownership, what impact does this reconstruction have on the idea of public space? In the pictures above, you'll see a healthy mix of people of all ages enjoying themselves, and most importantly, interacting outside of the confines of traditional work or school settings. It may not be explicitly politicized, but as anyone who lives in Tokyo can tell you, this is still deeply political. People from different walks of life are almost never brought together in relatively unstructured play environments, and it seems certain that the new Miyashita Park will act to strengthen social ties among area residents.

And the place truly is accessible to all. There are fees for using the facilities, but they're almost nominal: 200 yen for skating and 350 for climbing, about $2.50 and $4.50 U.S. respectively. Futsal court rental runs from 4000 to 6000 yen per hour, but with two sides of five players, that breaks down to about 600 yen, or seven dollars, per player. Especially in Tokyo, these are truly trivial amounts of money, just enough, I would say, to guarantee that those using the facilities will take some responsibility.

A second major issue for the activists was the forcible ejection of the homeless during construction of the park, and the suspicion that they would not be welcome in a new, corporate-sponsored park. (This complaint might be hard to understand from an American perspective, but here in Japan it's quite common for homeless residents in parks to be tacitly or even explicitly tolerated by authorities). I have mixed feelings about anti-camping laws: at least in the U.S., many homeless people truly need help, either with mental illness or substance abuse, to the extent that they're dangers to themselves and others. This seems to be slightly less true in Japan, mainly due to stronger familial safety nets, but it's nonetheless the case, particularly in a space as small as Miyashita, that campers made the park less usable for other people. In other words, homeless or not, they were using more than their share of a public resource, and using it in a way that interfered with others' enjoyment of it. While for the homeless, living in the park is probably nicer than being in a homeless shelter, I think that in this case it wasn't fair to the general public, and the park is now a greater public good.

Finally, activists objected, over and above the naming issue, to corporate control of the park. This is where I am likely to really clash with some of my friends - I think that it's great that Nike took the initiative to make this space more usable. This is especially true since, generally speaking, Tokyo's wards and the Japanese government are extremely bad at maintaining parks. Their manufacturing practices may be traditionally abhorrent, but Nike as an entity and a culture clearly has a far better sense of what people want to do for fun than anyone in any branch of Tokyo's metropolitan government, most of whose idea of fun is probably getting shitfaced in a no-panties hostess bar and charging it to public accounts. Japanese people have a huge love of outdoor activity, and cultivate it despite the almost uniformly lackluster provisions for things like soccer in Tokyo's public parks. If it takes a corporation to come in and do a better job, then so be it.

Just to reiterate, whatever good I think has come of this, the role of the activists was crucial. Everything good about the new Miyashita Park would have been rendered bitter and destructive by having Nike's name plastered all over it, and it's hard to say what the park might have ultimately looked like without their pressure. But now that it's quite literally a fait accompli, it's not fair to hold a grudge and completely deny the possibility that something good resulted. After all, I'm willing to bet some of those protesters like to skate.

Strotter Inst: Turntable Beatboxing tonight at Soup

2011-04-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

Last night I dropped by Superdeluxe for nine dollar beers and Jim O'Rourke, who turned out to be a little more than a decade older and schlubbier than I remember and playing some not enthralling Japanese-style noise. But what was hamazing was this guy Strotter Inst from Switzerland. You can't entirely tell what's going on from the photo, but in essence he has devised a very lo-fi drum machine by re-shaping vinyl, cutting discs so the stylus bounces or, more exciting, adding protrusions to discs that rhythmically slap against rubber bands stretched across the decks, on which the stylus is resting. This video has terrible sound, but should make that awkward description clearer:

The output is almost as amazing as the setup - pulsing, ultraprimitivist dance music.

Strotter plays again tonight at Soup in Koenji/Nakano: http://ochiaisoup.web.fc2.com/schedulethis.html

This is a must-see.

Cool in Tampa: Gettin' Ready

2011-04-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

So, it looks like in a couple of months I'll be moving from Tokyo to Tampa, Florida - I've landed a pretty sweet gig at the University of South Florida. But of course, man cannot live on work alone, so I'm also trying to find out what's going on there artistically/socially. If there's one thing I learned from living in Iowa, it's that there are creative types everywhere - you just have to find them. I started searching knowing only that there's some sort of noise festival in south florida every year . . . and it took me about two hours to discover that there's a LOT of weird art happening in central Florida.

Last year's Tampa stop of the post-noise conference tour featured several bands from Tampa. Here's T-Func, Slave Scene (promising), Neon Blud (seem serious, touring), Tyger Beat (opened for Matt and Kim), Haves and Thirds (likes beats!), Father Finger (actual songwriting! Worth another view), Skeleton Warrior (blog's not updated . . . defunct?), Boulders (I think this is their blog? or at least their label?)

This year's edition, in Miami (Which just happened in February), also featured a ton of FL bands, including No Milk (Really great, and her blog is a gold mine of Tampa information) and Alien Overmind (electronic noise!). Good writeup of top picks at Miami New Times.

Most exciting, Lazy Magnet is from Tampa, though may now live in Nashville (?). This guy used to come through Iowa, though I can't say I remember seeing him. Sadly, his Myspace (which has a friggin' great track on it) says the project is dead, but noise acts are like superhero sidekicks. He seems to really share my aesthetic - low, slow beats, heavy synths, and distortion. Russian Tsarlag is also from Tampa, but doesn't live there anymore, and was never quite my cup of tea.

Not surprisingly, a lot of these bands don't have much web presence. I can't find anything else about Body Rot, Craow, Outmode, or Brides of Borg.

There seem to be at least a couple decent venues. Events have been held at Cafe Hey, so I have a feeling I'll be spending some time there, though Google shows it's in a pretty bleak part of town. The Czar Bar displays good taste in booking and Soviet design (twitter: @czarnation). Iowa City's Supersonic Piss is apparently playing someplace called Heinrich's Workshop in a week or two . . . the only people listed. I'm guessing it's a warehouse/house, always promising. Seems there's a second house called the Branch Ranch Pervert Pit. Proper.

Others:

Florida Experimental blog Terminal Beach Party

Ordinary Hungry - Warded Halls label and show listings

Cephia's Treat - Haves and Nots Label

Something called Auf Bees. I have no idea what it is, but it's cool.

Civic Media Center, an infoshop in Gainesville, about two hours south of Tampa. Apparently one of the U.S.'s largest collections of 'zines.

St. Petersburg Institute of Noise - St. Pete label

The Black Box Theater at New College in Sarasota, FL (one hour south of Tampa).

Also in Sarasota and NCF affiliated, the Four Winds Cafe

Action Research, concert series in Gainesville, many hosted at The Lab

There does seem to have been something called Tampa Noise Fest at some point, but I'm not sure whether this is just another name for the after-shows of the International Noise Conference in Miami.

WMNF Community Radio Tampa - Puts on some fringe shows.

Last.fm group Experimental Southeast

Bicycle Scavenger Hunt sponsored by a vintage scooter club? I'm there.

Re/Creating Tampa: A fellow former UT Administrative Assistant blogging about Tampa.

Naturally, I'm also finding a lot of good stuff in Miami. It's four hours from Tampa, but unlike my days in Iowa, I'm actually going to have time to make that trip. So:

Churchill's Pub

Sweat Records store

Roofless Records (label?)

Squelchers (Miami Beach)

Bruise Cruise! Rock n' Roll Cruise taking off from Miami.

So, all told, it may not be Tokyo, but it's a great step up from Iowa - a close-knit network of towns within driving distance. Anything else great in Tampa and/or Florida that I'm missing? Of course, I'm not just into the noise/freak scene - I'll also be digging into the rap scene, and FOOTBAAAALL (I'm gonna meet Josh Freeman, I swear).

New Glaciers of Ice: "Black Rites in Space"

2011-04-18T04:56:00.001-07:00

Black Rites in Space by Glaciers of Ice

The Situation: Ishinomaki and Touhoku Relief

2011-04-17T17:58:00.000-07:00

I've just gotten back from a week doing cleanup and recovery work in Ishinomaki, a mid-size coastal city in the Touhoku area, north of Sendai. It will take some time to process the experience, so the following notes will be fragmentary, but the most obvious thing I learned is very simple - while financial contributions are vital, what Ishinomaki and cities like it are most badly in need of is boots on the ground. After the tsunami deposited thousands of tons of (probably toxic) mud throughout even the buildings it left standing, the amount of labor required to get even the relatively undamaged part of the city back to a state of usability is mind-boggling - and this is just one city out of dozens or hundreds so affected. Peace Boat is currently the only NPO accepting international volunteers in the affected areas, so if you can spare a week and have a tolerance for camping and hard labor, please contact them.

The Peace Boat deployment center is currently located on the campus of Ishinomaki Senshuu Daigaku (Ishinomaki Professional University). Conditions were cold early in the week, but they're warming up day by day and were fairly comfortable by the time we left.

This is what the upper part of Ishinomaki looks like three weeks after the Tsunami. The roads are cleared, but there is still debris everywhere. The wave entered every building, destroying furniture and fixtures and saturating every first-floor shop and residence with mud.

These are the bags we spent the week filling with the very particular sort of mud deposited by tsunami. Known as "hedoro", this is a mix of deep-ocean organic matter and industrial waste that has settled to the ocean floor, along with the various additional chemicals picked up in the town itself. It has been known to transmit tetanus.

At one point we burned a candle that had been doused in the mud, then allowed to dry. The dried mud burned like napalm.

This is how the mud gets in the bags - collected by brush, shovel, and squeegee. This is physically exhausting work, on top of the mental and spiritual strain of moving through what is, not to put too fine a point on it, the destroyed remains of people's livelihoods.

Of course, more than livelihoods were lost. One of the most heartrending elements of the landscape in Ishinomaki are these flyers searching for lost loved ones. The reality, of course, is that all those yet unlocated are almost certainly dead, their bodies somewhere out at sea or buried under mountains of rubble.

This is where some of the missing may still be located. As we were cleaning the hard-hit but still fundamentally intact upper parts of the city, the Japanese self-defense forces were still scouring the lower part of the city, which has been completely annihilated. Well, almost - amazingly, there are still a few people living in houses that were slightly elevated or for other reasons survived the tsunami.

This is what the most vulnerable portions of the city look like up close - the materials of modern human life subject to an unstoppable force of natural destruction.

There were, in fact, many signs of hope. For now, I'll stick to this one: on the Saturday we left, a high school track team that held practice on the university field where Peace Boat volunteers were camped. So, there are signs of the return to normality, and a great deal of amazing cooperation going into the rebuilding.

I'll post more of the upbeat aspects of the situation later, along with deeper contemplations - but for now, what's vital to understand is that you are needed. There are plenty of medical supplies and food available in Ishinomaki, and while the rollout of supplies to smaller communities has not been flawless, even they are now seeing a reasonable amount of support. But what's still not sufficient - what may never be sufficient, given the enormity of the task - is people willing to get their hands dirty.

Self-portrait with mirror, television, and toxic mud.

Hard In the Paint: Interview with Live Paint Team Doppel

2011-04-05T19:41:00.000-07:00

One really distinct thing about Japanese hip hop shows and parties is the frequent inclusion of a live paint, which is just what it sounds like - painters producing art live. Most often, the painting takes place over the course of three to five hours, slowly progressing, and giving things a real three-ring-circus feel, especially in certain of Tokyo's big clubs.

Doppel is a two-man team, Baki Baki and Mon, who have been doing live paint events together (as well as separately) since 2001. I saw them in March at Superdeluxe, where they did an unusual and compelling timed paint – they gave themselves exactly 20 minutes between acts to complete what turned into an elaborate, Ainu/Inuit inspired painting of a rearing horse-like creature. The timed element made it even more entertaining than the live paints usually are. The questions here were answered by member Mon (Koutaro Oyama) on behalf of the group.

Q: Were you originally inspired to do art by graffiti or hip hop?

A: The motive to start painting was separate from hip hop. Basically, we were both mostly inspired by Japanese manga and anime. But after starting, hip hop has had a huge influence on us. At the beginning, more than American graffiti, we were really influenced by KAMI and DELTA, graffiti artists from about two generations before us.

Q: Is Live Painting mostly done at hip hop shows?

A: We do it at shows in all kinds of genres. The first thing we did was a Drum and Bass party. Of course, we do a lot of hip hop shows, but also a lot of techno, house, and other kinds of dance parties.

Q: Have you ever done street graffiti?

A: Yeah, we do all kinds of tagging and stickering.

Q: Have you done other ‘timed’ events like the one at Superdeluxe?

A: Yeah, we did a 20 minute set at a party called HUOVA. As far as we know, that’s the first party to use that sort of time limit.

Q: I’ve seen similar Live Paint events happening in Cali. But it started in Japan, right?

A: We’re not sure whether or not it started in Japan. Graffiti artists have probably been writing at parties for a long time.

But our genre isn’t graffiti per se, it’s live painting [specifically]. After we started doing live paints, we met this guy named Heavyweight from Canada, and we were really influenced by his style. As far as Japan, Live Painting is a scene that started from the clubs and spread out. That’s why we use brushes and paint instead of spraypaint (spraying in a club can get rough). Now there are live paint artists all over Japan. We got started very early in that history. As far as artists doing live painting specifically, we were really among the first.

Q: Before a show, do you practice? For example, in circumstances similar to the show?

A: Almost never. Even when we practice, it’s not really connected to a [specific] show.

Q: At Superdeluxe, you painted together. Did you have a plan?

A: To a certain degree, we had a course of action. That was for the series called “Chimera.” At the Superdeluxe show, we’d only chosen that the lower half of the body would be a horse.

Q: At that show, the picture eventually became a horse [My mistake – a horse-like chimera]. It was suspenseful, though. Do you do things that way for the enjoyment of the audience?

A: Exactly. Depending on the order you lay down the details, a live paint can be dramatic, or it can be boring. Our ideal is that watching our shows will be just as exciting as watching sports.

Q: Is acting or performance important to the Paint?

A: It’s not important. We’re never acting. Sometimes we’ll shout or throw our hands up to get the crowd going, but it’s really not important.

Q: After the event, what happens to the paintings?

A: We keep them, and put a protective coating on them or frame them so they can be put on display.

Information about Doppel can be found at:

www.doppel.to

www.koutaroooyama.com

www.yamaokohei.com

Adorno on Culture: Soundscapes Resource

2011-04-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

Was just referred to this nice selective overview of Adorno's writing on music, sound, and culture.

International Transport Volume 4 - Black Music

2011-04-01T00:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we need fantasy and sometimes that fantasy can be pretty and heroic and help us forget our problems by pretending to be someone we aren’t, doing something else. But sometimes we need to deal with a reality that’s pretty dark – and maybe then, too, fantasy can help, but it’s a darker fantasy we need, something murky and menacing, something that might itself kill us if we’re not careful but that may also help us see a way out.

International Transport Volume 4: Black Music

Tracklist after

(Supplementary info and links after tracklist)

The Weeknd: The Knowing

Peaking Lights: 936

Shabazz Palaces: an echo from the hosts that profess infinitum

Clams Casino: Brainwash By London

Ga’an: Chasmaeon

Tyler The Creator: Yonkers

Makkenz: Yotsuashizoku [Four-Legged Gang]

Daterape: Disto

Umeko Ando: Emushi Rimuse

High Wolf: Solar System Is My God

Holy Other: YR LOVE

Fever Ray: The Wolf

L.A. Vampires and Zola Jesus: Bone is Bloodstone

Syd the Kid and Lux: Flashlight

Many of these tracks were located through Gorilla Vs. Bear, Altered Zones, or other hipster doucheblogs, or can be easily Googled. Notable exceptions are:

Daterape: soundcloud.com/daterapemusic

Umeko Ando: One of the most respected exponents of Ainu traditional chant and mouth harp.

Makkenz: http://makkenz.com/ or search “Makkenz” on amazon.co.jp

Bonus Track: Glaciers of Ice: Truth Serum; soundcloud.com/glaciersofice

And for those confused or upset by the title, it’s a Japanese thing. Everything from hip hop to reggae to house is commonly referred to here as “Black Music.” Obviously this is disturbingly blunt from an American perspective, where we prefer “urban” etc. I’m not sure whether I prefer the directness – but I do like the double meaning, which is mainly what I’m getting at here. Not “Black [People’s] Music,” but music for the blackest, hidden parts of your reptile brain.

New Holy Other: "Touch"

2011-03-31T19:00:00.000-07:00

Easily the most exciting act that I know of without an album yet, Holy Other are in a great spot between dubstep and "witch house" (or whatever). I'm not sure this is quite as amazing as "YR LOVE", a track that still completely blows my mind - but more Holy Other is, like a gift horses mouth, not to be looked into.

Touch by HOLY OTHER

Having the Time of Her Life: Dance/Display/Fantasy

2011-03-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

I spent last night (literally, it was an overnight that ended at 7am) at a hip hop show, a benefit for earthquake relief put on by Pop Group Records. I got there quite early, saw Club Asia before the lights were turned down, before the large staff blended into the crowd, running around with clipboards and checklists through what still looked like a workplace but was about to become a playground. Asia is a fantastic club, really, like a smaller but Tokyo-polished version of First Avenue in Minneapolis – that is, a hipster mecca, elevating underground music to a professional level of polish for a select (read: small) number of devotees. Although someone with connections to the club once stated with certainty that it was a money-loser subsidized by Vuenos, the cheesy dance club next door owned by the same people. So maybe good taste doesn’t pay. But it was a great night – I saw my friend the writer Shin Futatsugi for the first time in months, and the chance to get to know everyone in the Pop Group circle a little bit better. The place was full, so though Hiroki (head of Pop Group) didn’t seem super impressed, I gather some money was made for earthquake victims.

Early on, when the club was still only about a third or less full, one audience member was dancing to the early DJs. She was really enthusiastic and really attractive, owning the hell out of a charming and unusual fashion sense. I was up towards the front, against a wall, leaning against a table and taking some notes. As I half-wrote and half watched her dance, I had an experience that is embarrassing, but which, if this post is to have a leg to stand on, is not unique. It was impossible not to, at least at the back of my mind, think that she was dancing for me. When I’ve had a few drinks, this sense can become explicit and make me act like a stupid (read: average) male, but even standing there clear-headed, I could sense the logic unfurling in the back of my brain – she had noticed the tall, nerdy-looking writer, and was trying to . . . well, you can imagine the train of thought only gets more pathetic from there.

Of course, this was just a girl having a good time, and she didn’t deserve to be the object of even my most subconscious narratives. But it wasn’t just me – she was dancing in a mostly empty club, and couldn’t have failed to be somewhere in the attention of most if not all of the dozen-odd other people playing the wall. This, of course only adds to the bathos of my fantasizing – I’m sure it was shared by more than a few of the other guys around. In fact, I realized, the girl was both an object of desire and, in a less direct but structurally similar way, a model of enjoyment that served a variety of purposes in giving meaning to the event. She was a non-romantic, fantasy object for all of the workers who had set up the show, for the staff and servers and even to some extent the musicians. They were all there for her, to create the enjoyment of which she was the model. They certainly, in reality, were also doing it for those of us vaguely nodding our heads, enjoying the music and the feeling of being there in less expressive ways. But this explosively dancing girl required less interpretation.

I thought, particularly, of myself and the photographers, writing about or documenting the event. Her presence justified our activities, because she was the real thing – someone genuinely enjoying a party whose purpose was enjoyment. We, the watchers (professional and otherwise) needed her, because she enabled us to justify the fact that we weren’t engaged in a direct enjoyment of the event. To paraphrase Zizek’s formulation about laugh tracks, we needed that one girl to enjoy the even for us.

But even as I write this, I have to point out that it misses one dimension – that the photographer or the writer is not merely at a distance from the activity of ‘pure’ enjoyment, but is engaged in a ‘pure’ enjoyment of their own activity, one that the dancer in turn doesn’t know. The ultimate example of this is the musicians themselves, who I can guarantee from experience are having more fun than almost anyone in the audience, an enjoyment enhanced by, but not dependent on, enthusiastic audience members.

Vanity House: Glaciers of Ice, a.k.a. Me

2011-03-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

Just realized I haven't ever posted my own music here. In one of the classic examples of my work life and personal life being indistinguishable, I record for my own enjoyment, but also as a way to learn about the creative processes and business of music. I'm hoping to finish a Glaciers of Ice album within the next few months. I've got two tracks up, still just demos. Check out the short and to the point beat-driven synth-noise of "Truth Serum," or if you've got a few minutes the epic sci-fi synth trip "Dylan's Chase." I hope the title of the latter adequately acknowledges its deep indebtedness to Dylan Ettinger.

Glaciers of Ice -Truth Serum by Glaciers of Ice

Glaciers of Ice - Dylan's Chase by Glaciers of Ice

Information on Volunteering in Sendai with Peace Boat

2011-03-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a meeting of the Peace Boat N.P.O. here in Tokyo. Starting this Friday and continuing for some time after that, they'll be sending groups of volunteers for week-long stints aiding in distribution of food and supplies to refugees in the Sendai area. If you read Japanese, a great deal of information is available at http://volunteer.n-da.jp/.

This post is intended to provide a quick outline of this opportunity to help out. First it should be said that you might not be a good candidate if you a) can't speak at least passable intermediate Japanese and b) don't have considerable experience with camping or otherwise roughing it under extreme conditions. If after reading this you think you would be able to help, there will be a further orientation at the Peace Boat HQ in Takadanobaba on the 29^th. The time hasn't been decided, but I'll update people via the Tokyo Quake Cleanup group and my twitter. The group going this Friday will be too soon for most people, in part because of the preparation needed.

The Peace Boat volunteer coordinators made it clear that conditions are pretty extreme. People, including rescue and relief workers, are living in cars and in the second floors of buildings whose first floor collapsed. Peace Boat volunteers are camping outdoors, on the grounds of an elementary school. It's also still very cold in Sendai, making this situation even tougher. Because of the difficulty of the conditions, as well as the possibly traumatic nature of seeing what's going on up-close, they're limiting most volunteers to one-week rotations, although they will be encouraging those able to go more than once. There is plenty of work to do in Tokyo for those who can't make it to the North, such as collecting donations and sorting and packaging relief goods (I gather most of the groups of young, cheerful kids collecting donations around Tokyo starting last week are Peace Boat affiliated).

Because there are still basically no services to the north (no power, very little petrol), anyone interested in helping needs to be able to be totally self-supporting for a week at a time. The last thing anyone needs are volunteers who themselves need help. (The one exception was water, which it seemed is supplied – but only a moderate amount for drinking). This is not a complete list, but you will need to have:

-Your own tent, sleeping bag, and sleeping mat (Obviously, groups can share)

-Heavy-duty footwear (Trekking shoes or boots) and multiple changes of clothes appropriate to the conditions (i.e. cold and dirty).

-Eyeglasses, Goggles, or Sunglasses – contact lenses can't be changed or worn under the prevailing conditions

-At least 20,000 yen in cash for one week

-One week worth of food, preferably that doesn't require cooking. If you bring dehydrated food or other stuff that needs hot water, please also bring your own camp stove.

-Eating Utensils

-Writing materials (notebook, ballpoint pen)

-Toilet Paper and Wet-naps – water for washing hands will not be available.

-Toiletries (toothbrush etc), Flashlight, and any necessary medicine

You may also want: work gloves, knife, screwdriver, pliers

-The Peace Boat people weren't explicit about it, but as I've mentioned elsewhere, I think it would be a good idea to get a tetanus shot before going into the area.

Peace Boat does also offer (and may require, I'm not sure) a health and life insurance plan for volunteers, running to about 2000 yen for a week.

Again, more information will be available at an orientation on the 29^th. The best way to make sure you get the information is to either join the Facebook group Tokyo Quake Cleanup or follow this blog - I'll be sure to post it to both locations. And again, they are (quite understandably) not particularly well-equipped to deal with non-Japanese speakers at this point. However, the trip leaving next Friday is expected to have at least some bilingual volunteers who would probably be able to help out a bit.

Review - Peaking Lights - 936

2011-03-21T06:15:00.000-07:00

Peaking Lights - All The Sun That Shines from Not Not Fun on Vimeo.

This has already been reviewed back at Tinymixtapes, but I've been listening the hell out of it, so I thought I'd chime in. This band has been with me for a while, since they were great friends with the Night People crew back in Iowa City, and would come through a couple times every year between 2007 or so and my departure. When I first saw them, they were still a fairly sprawly, lo-fi psych act in some sort of Pink Floyd vein, but they quickly got more and more beat-oriented. 936 is the culmination of this - culmination in the sense that it's hard to imagine anyone doing the particular thing Peaking Lights do any better than it's done here. If Pocohaunted eventually turned into a raging Afrobeat band fronted by teenage girls, Peaking Lights is the Upsetters of American Underground Psych - they lay deeeeeep in the cut, from the ruthlessly minimal Linn drum patterns to the lo fi recordings to the utterly deadpan lead vocals. If you love analog warmth, tons of reverb and delay, and a steady, relaxed pulse, this is your record.

They have a decent sense with hooks, particularly on the track here, "All the Sun that Shines," but I can't say that's their real attraction. This is, for better or for worse, a 'background record,' one that I put on while I'm reading, one with a deep atmosphere but not a lot of foreground. Live, Peaking Lights is one of those bands made for closing your eyes and swaying gently from side to side, and right about now is the time when they have to decide if that's what they always want to be. But in this moment, listening to this record, I wouldn't want it any other way.

Tokyo Waits for the Other Shoe

2011-03-13T22:49:00.000-07:00

Things are extremely odd in Tokyo right now. On the one hand, many people have returned to work, trains are largely running again, the projected blackout was postponed, and the streets are completely calm. On the other hand, retail stores are full of people stocking up on water, batteries, flashlights, and candles. Shelves in convenience stores and places like Don Quixote (sort of like Wal-mart) are emptying of perishables such as bread. Even smaller stores are getting raided (and by raided, I mean "politely queued up to"). My local butcher is quickly running low. I got the last pack of tea candles at Tokyu Grocery, which is rationing all drinks to 3 PET bottles per customer. It seems most people are still unsure what the ripple effects of the quake are going to be.

Crowdsourcing Safety Information: Twitter and the Japan Earthquake

2011-03-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

I've spent most of the last three days perched in front of my computer, watching Japanese news, trying to sort and filter the various streams of information coming in via the internet and TV. Much of this is obviously self-interested, as I've needed to make sure I wasn't about to get poisoned with nuclear fallout or crushed in a particularly heinous aftershock (still not out of the picture).

But I would also like the think there's an element of service to it, as Twitter has become an important new channel of news, and it relies on the participation of a lot of informed people to shape the narratives that emerge from it. While I'm still not quite able to provide instant and accurate translations of the news coming to me over Japanese TV, I am still in a somewhat privileged position - the U.S. media, with the safety of distance, seems to be getting a little hysterical, while the Japanese news is engaged in a constantly updated filtering of crucial information.

Adelstein

Weirdly, though, the best example of how Twitter can work both positively and negatively has come from someone within Japan. At about 3pm Japan time on Sunday, Jake Adelstein, mostly known for his fantastic reporting on the Yakuza, started posting claims that elevated radiation levels had been detected in Tokyo, and encouraging people to take precautions including iodine dosing. He claimed this information came from a well-placed inside source whose identity he could not reveal, and he has sustained a drumbeat of warnings since then.

Adelstein is claiming that the Japanese government has a track record of deception regarding public safety threats - certainly true. He's also claiming that it's better to be safe than sorry - "I'm posting what I consider the equivalent of O-ring warnings. There is a possibility of disaster. People should know that it's there." But there's a hitch - he's been pushing the iodine thing pretty hard, and at least as far as I've been able to tell, iodine tablets are actually pretty difficult to get in Tokyo. I'm never in favor of ignorance, but in this case it seems there is no "safe" in the "better safe than sorry" argument, short of a mass evacuation that would probably itself cost lives. When Adelstein cites unnamed, shady sources claiming hazardous radiation flowing into Tokyo, even if he's right, he's potentially sending people into a panic that can't actually lead them to greater safety or peace of mind.

There's something interesting happening on Twitter around Adelstein - people are studiously ignoring him. There seems to have been no secondary confirmation of his claims, either from official sources or from any Japanese twitter source that has crossed the language barrier so far. This is particularly notable given the stew of overstatement that has surrounded the nuclear situation in the English twitterverse. There are two forces at work here, in real time - those of fear, caution, isolated rumor, and worst-case scenarios, arrayed against those of sanguinity, trust in authority, false security, and even-headedness. Obviously, each can be characterized as either positive or negative, and only time will tell whether Adelstein is being prudent or alarmist, and whether those ignoring him are being sensible or delusional. The bigger question is whether Twitter is helping sort this out better than traditional media, but again, I don't think we'll really be able to figure that out until a little ways down the road.

The 2011 Great Touhoku Earthquake: Civilization and Enlightenment Triumphant?

2011-03-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: As the New Yorker has pointed out, early casualty estimates have turned out to be vastly short of reality. This piece was written back when we still thought we'd dodged a bullet, and I'm going to let it stand as evidence of that moment. More commentary on the process of unfolding knowledge, however, will be forthcoming.

Three days ago I lived through what has now been confirmed as one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. Luckily, I was a small but crucial distance from the epicenter, in Tokyo, but the ground here still rolled and tumbled in a way that even Japanese people had never felt before. For the two or three minutes of the quake, I stood in the doorframe opening onto my porch, watching the tangle of power lines passing along the street sway crazily. It seemed not just possible, but probable that one or more of the complicated systems that sustain this mass hive of human life would come crashing down, its shards spreading death and destruction.

Tokyo 1923

That didn’t happen – Tokyo stands now almost as if the quake never happened. Just a few crumbled facades, quickly covered with neat tarps and scaffolding, remain to indicate what happened. For the moment, we’ve been lucky – by the time it got to Tokyo, the quake was only about a 6.0 magnitude. But there’s no guarantee that a quake of equal or greater magnitude won’t hit Tokyo more directly, within the next couple of days. This means we could all be in a new, unpredictable situation with little or no warning.

But what exactly is that situation? The last major Tokyo quake, the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, struck a much different society. Compare that quake, a magnitude 7.5 which killed between 100,000 and 140,000 people out of a regional population of 7 million, and the 1995 Kobe quake, a 6.8 in which 6,000 people died out of a total population of something like 1.5 million (That’s the 2006 census number, as I couldn’t quickly find data from the mid-1990s). The earlier quake killed something like 2% of Tokyo’s population. The latter, less than 1/10^th of 1% of Kobe’s.

There are too many variables to make the comparison airtight, but it’s obvious that many things changed in the intervening years. The New York Times did a good job of summing these up – they include training and preparedness, but most important of all is a dedication to buildings that can withstand major quakes. For anyone who felt Friday’s quake, the fact that Tokyo is standing now is nothing short of a miracle – the way the earth kicked, it seemed like a power pole would have little chance to withstand it, much less a ten-story building. Even since 1995, the government has stepped up regulations and pressure, which means that unless something pretty extreme hits Tokyo almost dead-on, the damage, while significant, is unlikely to be as cataclysmic as it was in 1923.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a fair amount about a fundamental question – is civilization itself a good or bad idea? Much prodding has come from my (still pretty limited) reading of Jonathan Zerzan, a major figure in the movement of ‘green anarchists’ who advocate, very broadly, the reversion from advanced capitalism to some modified form of hunter-gatherer society. As I sit here, waiting for a disastrous quake that could come at literally any second, I’m turning this idea over in my head, still unsure what the quake might make clear. On the one hand, most of the risk of death in a quake comes from collapsing man-made structures. More generally, we have built up such a complicated, crowded, and delicately balanced system that it is easier than ever for something like this to cause dramatic losses. Think about what northern Japan would have been like on Friday if there were no factories, no buildings, and only a few thousand people - it’s clear there would have been nothing like the mass destruction we’ve witnessed. Quite simply, the level of suffering would have been much, much lower.

Kobe 1995

But there is another way of looking at it, particularly if we shorten the time scale a bit. Whether you’re talking about a feudal castle, a one-story hovel, or an early-modern brick train station, most of the structures humans have recently called home are horrendously prone to complete collapse in the face of a serious quake. The past century has finally seen genuinely successful attempts to achieve some safety from this awesome force of nature. This isn’t just a matter of buildings, either – we’re also now enmeshed in global networks that allow both communication and direct relief to flow into devastated areas. This can’t save everyone, but it has already saved tens of thousands in the past few days. And then there’s education –as the Times poignantly points out, many of the dead in the southeast Asian tsunamis of a few years ago were swept out to sea because they failed to evacuate to safety, even though they had plenty of time. In Japan, evacuation was not complete, but it was still incredibly effective.

Obviously, we’re still far from secure (either on a day to day basis here in Tokyo, or on the larger scale of society as a whole), and it seems unlikely we ever really will be. But it also seems undeniable that the large-scale organization of human beings, in an explicitly hierarchical way, has produced huge gains in our collective safety. It’s also important to point out that this isn’t one of those situations where human beings are struggling to solve a problem that they themselves caused. Tectonic activity is simply something the earth does, with or without our influence. And while, all other things aside, the growing density of settlement makes the problem progressively worse, where do you draw that line? Again, a primitive dwelling is at least as prone to kill its inhabitants as a more ‘civilized’ structure, as the comparison between Japan and Haiti makes tragically clear.

Sendai 2011

I’m sure that anarchists of all stripes have answers for what their ideas would mean for the long-term developments of science, of architecture, of organized education, and of communication and mutual support networks. (And I don't mean to politicize this in some petty, short-term way - dealing with these real issues is why politics matter in the grandest possible sense, and I can't think of a more important time to talk about them). But having (at least for now) lived through a true existential threat to one of the world’s great civilizations, I find myself comforted by the embrace of Enlightenment. Maybe it’s the secular version of a deathbed conversion, but I would not have chosen to face the earthquake in a society less advanced, well-organized, and disciplined than Japan.

Japan Quake Update

2011-03-11T01:47:00.001-08:00

For anyone who might be checking, I'm fine and things in Tokyo are relatively stable for now. More soon.

Plato on Music as a Threat to Order

2011-03-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

I'm teaching Mladen Dolar's excellent book A Voice and Nothing More, and came across a passage that I had unforgivably forgotten, in which Dolar joins with Plato in laying out the fundamental reason I study music - because it has profound anti-authoritarian potential. Remember, of course, that Plato himself is rather a Machiavellian apres la lettre.

A change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions . . . it is here, then, I said, that our guardians must build their guardhouse and post of watch.

It is certain, he said, that this is the kind of lawlessness that easily insinuates itself unobserved.
Yes, said I, because it is supposed to be only a form of play and to work no harm.

Nor does it work any, he said, except that by gradual infiltration it softly overflows upon the characters and pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown greater to attack their business dealings, and from these relations it proceeds agains the laws and the constitution with wanton license, Socrates, till finally it overthrows all things public and private. (Republic IV, 424c-e)

As Dolar demonstrates, the greatest risk of music comes (according to Plato) when it doesn't match the words, when its meanings are ambiguous or its tone feminine. Plato elaborates on what follows unregulated music:

So the next stage of the journey toward liberty will be refusal to submit to the magistrates, and on this will follow emancipation from the authority and correction of parents and elders; then, as the goal of the race is approached, comes the effort to escape obedience to the law, and, when that goal is all but reached, contempt for oaths, for the plighted word, and all religion. The spectacle of the Titanic nature of which our old legends speak is re-enacted; man returns to the old condition of a hell of unending misery. (Laws III, 701 b-c)

Right on, brother. Right on.

Scratching the Surface: Japan

2011-02-27T21:18:00.000-08:00

Potentially interesting, but the preview isn't exactly gangbusters. 2005 documentary about Japanese hip hop.

http://www.thesrk.com/301141

Available for purchase on DVD.

Academic Cliché Watch Volume 4: Admitting Defeat

2011-02-27T20:22:00.000-08:00

I had a very dispiriting exchange recently on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to. The main topic at issue was the accessibility of research online and/or through illegal means. The two separate issues got a little blurred, but my position basically was that it is our job as academics to work for the good of all, and that making our work available as widely as possible was part of our role in society. Separately from the issue of the survival of institutions such as journals (which I agree are very important), several other discussants took the position that academic research shouldn’t be widely available because it might be subject to misinterpretation or misuse.

This is a position that I’ve seen surface before in the reticence to publicity of a lot of graduate students I studied with. I always supposed this was simply a lack of confidence that people would grow out of. Imagine my surprise to find that, quite to the contrary, it is a fear that only becomes formalized and rationalized as individuals of a certain type progress through the academy.

One of the responses was borderline offensive, equating the work of academics with that of the research subjects who we interact with, as deserving of careful protection as the cultural practices of isolated primitive tribesmen. This is a complete abdication of the responsibility of representation that is inherent to the role of the academy. It is our job, quite literally, to frame the world carefully and knowledgably for those who want to learn about it. Saying that the public is somehow ‘unprepared’ for our work reminds me of nothing so much as those who complain that their students aren’t smart enough for what is being taught. You’ve got it backwards. It is not the job of your audience to interpret your work in the way you intended – it is your job to make your intention clear and accessible to your audience.

I received a response to this sentiment that dug even further into the depths of blinkeredness. Essentially it boiled down to: “Yes, it would be great if we could all write material that represented our subjects responsibly, but we don’t live in a utopia like that, so I’m going to continue arguing for limited access to academic work.” I find this absolutely stomach-turning, as it boils down, not to an admission of defeat, but a desire to eliminate the possibility of failure by getting rid of any condition for success. “We are imperfect and therefore should not strive to work up to a standard that will withstand scrutiny.” What this boils down to is professional irresponsibility.

Obviously, the audience for academic work is not often going to be a broadly-defined “general public,” and not all researchers have the skills as writers to push their agenda along those channels. But consciously talking only to those within the academy is the height of ridiculous self-defeat - the world is full of thoughtful and inquisitive people, often in better positions to make practical use of researchers' insights than other researchers will ever be. We have to be willing to let our work into the world, realizing that it is subject to misinterpretation or misuse, but working to the limit of our various powers to limit that risk. Anything less is simply cowardice.

EXCLUSIVE: Gold Panda remixes Yamaan, "Blossom"

2011-02-26T20:58:00.000-08:00

I've written here before about Yamaan, a producer from Tokyo's Temple ATS label. Gold Panda, he of one of 2010's hottest albums, just dropped this version of the fourth track on Yamaan's "12 Seasonal Music." The track, including vocals by Chiyori, filters Yamaan's pretty, clean sense of nostalgia through the beautiful dirt that now rules Western beatstyle.

Blossom (Chorus By Chiyori)- GOLD PANDA REMIX by YAMAAN

Also, I'm pretty sure I'm the first to have this joint, many thanks to Yamaan!

Download the MP3 here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=O0UUZN4U

Japan is Run By Racist Idiots Who Prefer Robots to Brown People

2011-02-25T19:54:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just have to call 'em like you see 'em. In this case, the strike zone is pretty wide.

On the one hand, you have the billions of yen over the years poured into programs to develop home-care robots. I would be shocked to find that any remotely responsible health care expert could have thought this was a good idea even at its earliest stages. Health care is not just about lifting and moving people - the CARE is right there in the name, and we're still quite a distance from developing any robot with that capability.

On the other hand, you have the intentional sabotage of a program intended to extend residency to highly-trained and carefully vetted nurses from the Phillipines and Indonesia. This is reflective of a much wider resistance to any formal immigration liberalization. Equally pathetic is the recent celebration of the arrival of a handful of individual and families from Myanmar as part of a U.N. resettlement program. The latter is a more purely moral failure, where the former shows an inability even to act in rational self-interest. I'm speculating a bit here, but I would bet short odds that the root cause of these ridiculous and shameful policy failures is the deep racism of a relatively small but powerful segment of the Japanese right wing.

I've been watching Treme, and in the second episode there's a moment where a lawyer who is trying to navigate the insanity of post-Katrina police bureaucracy simply loses her shit and starts screaming curse words into a pillow. I can think of few more correct responses to such a patently ridiculous situation as this one.

Notes from the Field: Indie Index - Hip Hop Sales in Japan

2011-02-23T21:02:00.000-08:00

So, I recently had a chat with a new friend of mine (who at least here will remain anonymous) who worked for an indie label that released Western/English hip hop in Japan between 2006-2008. I thought I'd share a few highlights from our conversation. Most interesting to me was that, since he's not working for the label anymore, he wasn't shy about numbers. I'm in a lusty, desirous relationship with information about how many units people are moving, and how much money they're making, so, with no apologies to Harper's:

Note: This may be an empty gesture, but I ask that you NOT use this information elsewhere without permission.

20-30,000: Number of units moved by Nujabes, the Japanese producer of jazzy instrumentals. These numbers were big enough to set off a wave of imitators/followers. This was not a record released by my friend's label, but it helped guide the direction of what they chose to release.

18%: The very highest royalty rate offered by my friend's label. This is for artists who were established or otherwise expected to do particularly well. The lower end of the range was 12%. According to another source, royalty rates have plummeted since in the last four or five years.

9,000: The number of units shifted by a record that did "pretty good" for my friend's company. This was a record that, I was amazed to hear, was crafted by a Western artist, specifically for the Japanese market, expanding on a particular sound found on a handful of previously released tracks.

Y2,400: A pretty typical retail price for a Japanese release. More than $30 at current exchange rates. My friend added a couple of pieces to the puzzle as to exactly why this is so high. First - higher production values of the average Japanese CD (digipacks instead of jewel cases). Second - the henpen distribution system, which requires labels to accept returns of unsold product from distributors, who nonetheless take their distribution fee even on unsold copies. This leaves the label exposed to a great deal of risk.

$25,920: What an new artist could expect to make from a "pretty good" CD release, assuming the numbers above, and at 2006 exchange rates.

30: A very, very rough approximation of the number of hours it takes to make one fully developed, professional song, from start to finish. Probably an underestimate.

12: Rough average of the number of songs on a full-length album.

260: Number of hours spent recording a full-length album.

$99.69: Hourly rate of pay for recording an album that sells 9,000 copies.

This looks pretty sweet at first, but at least from a purely economic point of view, doesn't take into account a few things. Most immediately, the costs of recording and promotion, which can fall variously on artists, labels, or even clubs, would have made this number smaller (or in a few cases, larger, maybe) than when it comes out of this simple equation. Especially for a first album, this amount would need to account for initial investment costs, i.e. gear a musician bought for the purpose of teaching themselves how to make music. Similarly, there's no accounting here for many, many hours spent teaching oneself to be at least a half-decent musician. If Malcolm Gladwell is to be trusted, this would be about 5,000 hours (we're talking competent here, not someone of the world-class, 10,000 hours type). With that one adjustment, suddenly the hourly rate for that first, moderate-performing album becomes . . .

$4.97.

Eat your heart out, investment bankers.

A final tidbit, from a totally different source:

6,000: Number of units moved by a fairly well-known and respected Japanese DJ/Producer.

Academic Cliche Watch, Minisode 1: "Famous"

2011-02-20T22:35:00.000-08:00

"In her famous book, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997), Nina Aurbach writes that . . . " etc.

This was the opening sentences of a call for papers I just received. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I've never heard of this book, and Aurbach's name only vaguely rings a bell. This is a classic example of some bad academic writing's tendency to make claims rather than arguments for its subject (see also: "clearly," "obviously," "crucially," "not insignificantly," "powerful," ad nauseum.)

The rest of the call was actually really interesting, but think about how this choice of words positions the reader. Either they agree that the book is famous, and they have gained very little from having their opinion confirmed, or they, like me, have no reason to agree. In the second case, they may either a) experience a grad-school-like pang of insecurity and scurry off to catch up on some book that an anonymous emailer claimed was famous, b) pass through the phrase gaining little from that extra F word, or c) take the writer themselves for someone so wracked by insecurity that they don't feel comfortable citing a book without simultaneously claiming that it's "famous." In none of these scenarios does the claim that a book is famous add value.

The Pre-History of Japanese Hip Hop 2: The Japanese Olio Minstrels, March 27th, 1854

2011-02-20T18:12:00.000-08:00

After hearing some academic rumors to this effect, I've finally done the digging, and it's true: when Admiral Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1854, a troupe of minstrels was on board the U.S.S. Powhatan with him. They performed in both Tokyo and Yokohama, more than once. NYU's Victor Fell Yellin (whose name could actually be the title of a minstrel routine) has got the academically legitimized version. Less authoritative-looking but very informative is this brief article (Japanese), which draws its information from Kasahara Kiyoshi's 黒船来航と音楽　(Music and the Arrival of the Black Ships).

And there are a few great images floating around the web:

A program:

A Western depiction of the March 27th "Welcome Party" (talk about a euphemism) at which the minstrels performed. I can't quite tell from this whether that's actually them on stage.

And best of all, one of several images of the troupe produced by Japanese artists of the era:

Lullatone - Experiments Around the House

2011-02-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

Just got a nice mail from Shawn, of the Nagoya band Lullatone. At least at first glance, they fit very well into a broader Japanese indie trend toward pretty, cute, quiet electro-pop. Also, like some similar bands, they get a lot of mileage out of toys.

Lullatone seem pretty explicitly a band targeted at the parents of small children (check out some of their album titles) but they do invite more probing analysis of what makes similar music so appealing for some young adults. I'm going to go with crippling fear of the future and a desire to return to the safety of the nuclear family, but I might be projecting a bit.

(continues frantically looking for a job . . . )

Finding the Freaks

2011-02-17T19:31:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I've developed pretty sophisticated freak radar. After six months in Tokyo, slowly circling and infiltrating and honing in, I finally struck real gold last night.

This is an unfortunately pretty crummy cel-phone picture of Zool.Gel, aka Keito Suzuki (Japanese blog), playing at Nantoka Bar, an anarchist spot in Koenji I'm going to write more about soon. That is a fountain of red goop descending from a shelf. It dripped and plopped throughout his intense set, which included earphone-mics shoved into jars of goop, lots of looping effects, and most of all, this amazing hand-blown glass water-flute that produced some tremendously weird bird-like sounds.

As good as the show was, though, the weirdest part was the connection - Keito is part of the band Topping Bottoms, which put out some tapes on the Not Not Fun label. That's the same label that put out a fair amount of stuff from Racoo-oo-oon and some other Iowa-ish bands that I wrote about for Signal to Noise last year.

I feel like I've finally found My People - especially since Zool.Gel also makes weird hip hop beats.

2011-02-17T01:25:00.001-08:00

Notes from the Field: Three Studios: Hip Hop Life

2011-02-16T23:17:00.001-08:00

In the last month or so, I've checked in on a few Japanese underground producers to talk and see their equipment setups. First, I got DJ Terror-D (Terada) of Deep Throat X to give me a tour around an MPC in his apartment in Kichijoji. Then I took a pretty epic trek to see KOR-One in southwest Tokyo, and finally dropped in much closer to home, checking on DJ Muta right nextdoor in Koenji. What I saw told me almost as much about their craft and their places in society as what they had to say.

It's probably better to refer to Terror-D as plain old Terada, since Deep Throat X, along with its porno-punk aggressiveness and noms-de-beat (partner Nakamura is known as Middle Finger), is on a hiatus following the release of their debut album, XXX. At around the time that project was finished, Terada decided to take a hiatus from his double life as both a fiery musician and a 'salaryman' for a tech-support company. He took off for three months Tuva, a remote area of Russia where he studied traditional Tuvan music, including the surreal and beautiful art of throat singing. When he got back from Russia, he began receiving unemployment payments, which seemed strange, since he quit his job rather than being fired. He's now been on the dole for a good six months, and says his payments will run out in a month or two. His plan after that is to enroll in computing school. He's doing this even though he has a firm command of modern personal computing, since, again, the government will give him a stipend for retraining. After that, he says, he'll go back to Russia. Longer-term, he loosely considers that he might make a living teaching traditional Tuvan music in Tokyo. Terada is now 33.

His living arrangements reflects his willingly straightened circumstances. His apartment could be best described by the disused English term “flophouse,” with all the mystery and desperation it implies. It is a cramped, bleakly shadowy building in a dingy neighborhood. We walk up a rickety staircase covered in a crumbly mix of sick-green paint and defiant rust. As we take off our shoes in the narrow hallway beyond the outer door – there is nothing resembling an entryway – I notice a tub-like metal sink halfway down the dimly-lit hall. This would be a great setting for a horrific Japanese splatter film, in which some defenseless schoolgirl is kidnapped and tortured by a maniacal doctor, her cries unheard even by the grey, indifferent neighborhood.

Things are marginally brighter in Terada's tiny room. We squeeze in past a washing machine that half-blocks the entryway, into a space big enough to hold one and a half American queen size beds. It's a traditional Japanese room – that is, it has tatami flooring and a closet intended for storing a futon during the day. But since the closet seems full of basically unidentifiable junk rather than bedding, I have a hard time figuring out where Terada sleeps. He's told me there's no bath, so he regularly goes to shower at a mangakissaten, or bathe at an ofuro, a traditional Japanese communal bath of the sort which have become more and more scarce as private bathrooms have become standard in Japanese apartments.

It's midwinter, and Terada is running a gas heater. Directly next to the door is a large, red gas can – fuel for the heater, and possibly also for the filthy one-burner stove Terada uses to boil water for coffee and tea. It sits next to a sink, this one much smaller but of the same square-steel variety as the larger one in the hall - the handwashing station to its autopsy giblet-sluice. There's a small, dingy couch and a small CRT television, under which I will later notice a significant collection of porn films on VHS. I hear movement through the walls and in the hallway, and imagine stooped, grey figures lurking about like ghosts, each of whom lives in quiet sadness in an equally fetid nest. Terada shares a toilet with these moving whispers, and though I won't realize it until I'm on my way home, I hold back the need to pee for the duration of the visit. This is, in short, the apartment of somebody at the bottom of the social ladder. His rent is about 30,000 yen, or $300 a month.

What separates Terada from his neighbors (at least in his own version of events) is that he ended up here willingly, and is spending his days in study as he works to craft a freer, more fulfilling future. The signs of this are just as prominent as the place's dinginess – the walls are lined with shelves holding books and vinyl, carefully categorized and labeled, and four guitars hang on another wall. Below them is a broad desk, white but not particularly clean, with a computer monitor, speakers, and a few small keyboards scattered around. Off to one side is a collection of DJ and music gear, including turntables, mixers, and CD players, mostly still under plastic – Terada tells me he hasn't been listening to or making very much music in the hip hop/electro style DTX is best known for, and he has to basically get his MPC out of storage in order to show it to me.

DJ Kor-One's studio space is a significant contrast. He lives even further away from central Tokyo than Terada, but shares a spacious and clean 3LK (that is, three bedrooms surrounding a living room and small but comfortable kitchen). His two roommates have balconies, and one is large enough to house a seven-foot climbing wall (although it cantilevers nearly over that roommate's desk). Kaori's room is smaller and has only a window towards the parking lot, so he pays less than his roommates – only about 40,000 yen a month, a low price which helps make it possible for him to work only four days a week at his job at an amusement park. His roommates are musicians as well, and one of them spent much of my visit working on a remix for a Japanese reggae band.

Kaori’s bedroom doubled as studio space, but there was enough space for us to jam a little bit after he’d set up the MPC for me. He used a setup based on Native Instruments’ Maschine, a piece of software bundled with a controller that mimicked the look and feel of the MPC, with its array of drum pads. Maschine has a few advantages over the MPC in terms of flexibility and convenience, but as Kaori pointed out and even an amateur like myself could tell after a quick comparison, the hardware/software combo couldn’t get the same level of responsiveness and sensitivity you get with the MPC. It’s an almost imperceptible but really important difference.

Finally, DJ Muta’s space reflected the relatively greater success he’s had, both as a member of the group Juswanna and in working as a DJ for various events affiliated with Libra Records, one of the biggest independent operations in the underground. In fact, just a few days before talking to him, I got to see him DJ in front of thousands of people at the final round of the Ultimate MC Battle. Though his studio space was almost as small as Kor-One’s or Terror-D’s, it was in a one-bedroom apartment much closer to the center of Tokyo, and was packed full of much more high-end gear, such as a big-screen Macintosh and a sophisticated production desk that he’d built himself (including an impressive slide-out rack for his synth controller). Like Kaori and Terada, Muta’s space was packed floor to ceiling with records, quite literally at the limit of the space’s ability to hold it. This is what high-achievement looks like in Japan – a rather unspectacular apartment transformed with some ingenuity and hard work into something nearly livable.

I was relatively more interested in talking to Muta than getting a music lesson from him, but he did show me a couple of the pieces of software he uses to make music, and played a couple of things he’s working on – particularly, a mix he’d made including, of all things, Joni Mitchell. I’ll be writing a bit more about my conversation with Muta, in which he had some really inspiring things to say about the reasons he’s a musician, soon.

Liyoon - Japanese Killer Whale

2011-02-16T18:28:00.002-08:00

I can't believe I haven't heard about this already. Apparently released about five months ago, this is in some ways a predictable Japanese "national pride" perspective on the discussion over whaling/dolphin hunts that's still boiling well after the release of The Cove. But there are several weird/interesting twists, some of which will be obvious immediately:

It makes a lot of sense that this is in English, since the essential message is about the hypocrisy and even racism of the Western anti-whaling position. The most convincing point made, as far as I'm concerned, is that pigs, like dolphins, are pretty smart animals, but the West eats tons of them anyway (actually, so does Japan, but I think the point still stands).

The really interesting part, and a vital reminder of the vastly different Japanese political landscape, is that Liyoon is Zainichi - a Japanese-born Korean. He used to belong to a group called KP, which stood for "Korean Pride." From an American perspective, it's odd to think about an ethnic minority pushing such an overtly nationalist (or at the very least, patriotic) viewpoint, but the dominance of American influence in Japanese politics and culture changes the math radically. At some moments it makes sense to identify as Zainichi against a Yamato ethnic mainstream, but at least as often someone like Liyoon is going to encounter threats to the "Japanese" side of his identity, and feel the need to rise to their defense.

That reactive/defensive stance seems omnipresent - in fact, it pretty much explains the whole whale situation. Most Japanese don't actually eat whale meat, but many nonetheless support the hunt because it has a symbolic power even if they're not participating in it. It represents their ability to defy the West, and specifically America (home of the Sea Shepard), at least in some relatively small way. If that element of defiance wasn't important, it's pretty clear most Japanese, at the very least, wouldn't care about whale hunting one way or the other.

International Transport Volume 3 – Dirty Black Ships

2011-02-09T19:58:00.000-08:00

“Tranquility now is just future anarchy unbirthed.”

International Transport Volume 3 - Dirty Black Ships (Temporary!)

In 1854, Japan learned the wrong lesson from America and the West. There wasn’t any real choice – faced with guns, technology, and aggression, the alternatives were to either answer with more of the same, or to capitulate with the rest of Asia, South America, Africa, and Native America. And so Japan modernized, from the top down, sending its greatest minds for immersion in Dutch Learning and its greatest spirits to the concert halls of Vienna to learn the even temper of the West. This westernized elite had, arguably, even more power than those who inspired it, because in addition to wealth, they had unique access to a whole system of values – about individualism, freedom, and ambition – while Japan’s peasants continued to be fed the ideology of self-sacrifice. They didn’t always buy it, the human spirit isn’t that easy to squash. But enough of them did.

Today, things may finally be changing, in at least one way. Japanese mainstream pop music is among the world’s shallowest, a wad of bubblegum shoved into the social eye of the truth, run by a mafia-esque elite machine which independent voices haven’t got much of a chance of penetrating. But a bunch of artists and labels are working hard to change that – to get other voices out into the world, where maybe they can inspire some peasants. This mix is a gift for all of them, inspiration from West to East, a mess of messages from the bottom to the top – from the workers to the kings, from the disgruntled to the complacent. It's dirty but it's beautiful. It's scary but it's seductive. It's loud.

It’s something you get better at with practice.

Playlist after the jump.

Suicide – Frankie Teardrop

The Watts Prophets – Hello, Niggers

Earl Sweatshirt – Earl

oOoOO - Mumbai

jj – Let Them

Crystal Castles – I am made of Chalk

Universal Swimsuit - yeahsureofcourse

Too Short – Don’t Stop (DJ Screw)

Gravediggaz – Bang Your Head

Hawkwind – Motorhead

Dinosaur Jr. – Lose

Marnie Sterne – Cinco De Mayo

Gang Gang Dance – House Jam

Jan Hammer – Evan

Emeralds – Double Helix

Single Indian Tear – Worship

Tim Hecker – Hatred of Music

Dum Dum Girls – Baby Don’t Go

Japan the Beats

2011-02-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

Welcome to everyone finding my blog via my column at Tinymixtapes. A couple posts of particular interest:

Japanese hip hop prehistory: Jagatara

The Sumo Tapes: Ganja, Rappers, and Big Fat Asses

You can also find a ton of good stuff just by following the "Japanese hip hop" tag, conveniently attached below.

For those headed the other direction, here is the most recent Japan the Beats at Tinymixtapes, about Origami, nostalgia, and indie-farm fashion.

Synergy, baby!

A Job You're Supposed to be Terrible At: Lessons from Six Months of Fieldwork

2011-02-08T17:49:00.000-08:00

As of this morning, I've officially been in Japan for six months, at the pleasure of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. I have six months left on my current appointment, which was granted to me to fund research into Japanese hip hop. Ethnography/fieldwork/journalism/ “research” is something you can only learn by doing it, and despite some previous experience this stretch has been full of new challenges. I guess it's a pretty rare situation I find myself in, but maybe more universal principles can be derived from the various ways I've screwed up.

Writing is an Excuse for Not Working. In the afterglow of completing a dissertation that was at best 15% fieldwork, this has been the biggest, hardest lesson. I had worked hard to develop a craftsman's discipline – getting up every day and writing for three or four hours, crawling bit by bit through a big project. Writing was the be all and end all, the Alpha and Omega of my existence as a doctoral candidate, and as a job seeker in the academic market. So it was strange when, on finding out about my posting, a member of my committee gave me this sterling advice: “Don't worry about writing. Focus on research.”

Research is What Happens While you Make Plans. It's important – even vital – to have a research agenda. There are, of course, plans to be made, appointments to set up, contacts to cultivate online. But it's even more vital to figure out the right place to spend time doing nothing. This may seem like the most obvious thing in the world to properly trained ethnographers or anthropologists, but particularly for someone trained in theory, it takes a while to sink in. I end up with notebook pages full of hot leads, new contacts, and essential facts just from sitting in a bar or in someone's office with no particular agenda. It's a lesson for life, really – be ready for anything, including boredom. Boredom, after all, is the seedbed of opportunity.

Booze is in Fact Not an an Ethnographer’s Best Friend. I (and I know I’m not alone in this) drank a lot in graduate school. Considerably more, even, than I drank in college. Since most of my initial research took place in bars and nightclubs, the habit naturally continued during my doctoral research. And on some level I found it a lot easier to interact with people in Japanese after downing a few beers. But there comes a certain inflection point where that method of connecting to people becomes less and less effective – particularly, this is true once you’re already a known quantity in a community and the job becomes much more about following up on leads and interviewing people, or more generally about pursuing a particular agenda rather than just learning “the lay of the land.” I actually had to quit drinking entirely for health reasons about a month ago (don’t mix booze and allergy meds!), and I’ve found myself a lot more effective since then, because I’m able to be more methodical and less impressionistic. Not to mention the crazy amounts of money I’ve saved.

Quit Getting Up So Early. Depending on your specialty, a corollary to Lesson 2. In the world of music, the only things that are going to happen before noon are things you do alone. And that's not where the action is.

Shit Happens (So Take Care of Yourself). On top of the predictable challenges and time-consumption of moving and settling into a foreign country, I got pretty ill for about two and a half months this past fall. This wasn't a life-threatening illness, but rather a combination of allergies and sinus infections that took my energy levels and focus down to about 70%. I spent this period repeatedly cursing myself for collapsing exhausted before getting out to shows where I could do research (see also Lesson 3), meanwhile feeling certain that health was just around the corner. What I didn't do was go to the frickin' doctor. The language barrier was certainly an intimidation factor, but I should have known better.

And finally, Blogging is Fantastic. Not only does an online notebook give you a great place to collect the random thoughts and tidbits of information that collect like whitecap flotsam during a project like this, without drawing you into the vortextual depths of overthinking, it simultaneously gives you a platform for networking, an increasingly vital element of research - to say nothing of the infinite joys of self-promotion.

The Pre-History of Japanese Hip Hop 1: Jagatara

2011-01-25T03:42:00.000-08:00

As I work on synergizing my blog writing with the long-term goals for my book, there's one project in particular I think I can process in sufficiently tiny chunks - the survey of the variety of acts that laid the groundwork in music for the emergence of hip hop. It's a long history - urban Japan was consuming Jazz en mass as early as the 1920s, and there are reports (which I'll be working to substantiate) that Admiral Perry brought a troupe of blackface minstrels with his port-opening Black Ships (an association that I don't want to forget).

But a more immediate cause was the string of funk, reggae and soul bands stretching from the 1960s to the 1980s, introducing 'black music' in a more explicit, and often more politicized, form than had been the case back in the 1920s (and translating - literally - the extreme politicization of funk and jazz during the AMPO protests of the 1960s.

One of the most important immediate inspirations for the direction taken by Japanese hip hop - specifically, the politicized hip hop underground - was the band Jagatara. In fact, right now I'm watching the documentary/concert film Jagatara - この～！！（もうがまんできない）[We Can't Take It Anymore!]. The band, and particularly leader Edo Akemi, are recurring cult figures in Japanese hip hop. Jinno Toshifumi made the band the focus of a huge tome, and Akemi gets a shout out at the beginning of ECD's seminal album Big Youth, stacked up with Malcolm X, Bob Marley, and other luminaries of rebellion for justice. I've heard a couple of their albums, but I never quite got it - they always seemed way too slick for me.

A live recording will almost always correct any problems of slickness, and this one is particularly grimy, since the first segment was recorded in 1989 on equipment that was not particularly sterling even for the era. But the other misperception it's helping me correct is one of genre - I've faulted Jagatara for being a too-slick funk band, but what they really were was a reggae band, with a heavy debt to hard rock.

Here's a taste of what they're like (with more videos available if you click through):

But the reason this guy could transcend genres to live on as a symbol for later artists is pretty clear. In an interview segment in the middle of this video, recorded sometime in the 1980s (he died in 1990), he calls the 1980s a "failure," a stance that would have made him the definition of an iconoclast at the time. He predicts that in the 1990s, music is going to get wider, brighter, and more open to "world music," which kind of turned out to be true (reggae and hip hop only kept getting bigger) and sort of didn't (if anything, lame idols and J-pop became even more dominant in the 1990s before R & B came on in the 2000s).

Following the interview, there's a really electric performance of a hard dub/reggae song with Mute Beat (another candidate for prehistorical importance). What comes across in all these performances is a great deal of passion, and Akemi knows perfectly well that's what he's got to offer - as he says in the interstitial interview, it's easy enough to understand where Jagatara are coming from in terms of genre. What's not so easy to understand, and what most other Japanese bands at the time couldn't capture, was their expressive energy.

Against Greatness: Tim Ferriss and the Ideology of Achievement

2011-01-24T17:40:00.000-08:00

Two days ago I managed to grab the last copy of The 4-Hour Body on display at Kinokuniya in Shinjuku. I can't lie - I'm a devoted follower of Ferriss, which started about two years ago when I adopted a simplified, catch-as-catch-can version of the "slow carb" diet that he endorsed on his blog. By following the eminently sensible advice to cut white carbs almost entirely from my diet, I lost about fifteen pounds in something like three or four months. I've since plateaued at a very respectable 181 lbs (at 5'11"), and I picked up the book in hopes of following some of the more detailed advice in it, and getting past that plateau. I'll be writing at least a little bit about that process at my other blog, Flexy Beast.

So, I'm a fan, and I believe in his program - I've seen for myself that at least part of it works. But at the same time, I find myself questioning the whole premise of his project (I'm like that scorpion - it's in my nature). Should we, as the tagline for the new book puts it, be interested in "becoming superhuman"? Achievement, excellence, and overcoming are the foundations of Ferriss' empire, in a very concrete sense - his financial success was initially built on selling vitamins, which (true or not) promise miraculous personal advancement. His first book, "The 4-Hour Workweek," is intended to help you 'have it all' - to have both the money provided by a successful career, and the time to enjoy it.

In my own work and life, I constantly encounter people for whom this model simply doesn't hold. Musicians, writers, artists, and activists have measures of success that don't map to how much you can deadlift or how much money you make. Last week I talked with DJ Muta, the producer and turntablist for the group Juswanna, and he couldn't have been more explicit: "If your aim as a musician is just to make a living off your music, you're setting your sights too low. I make music so I can help people, give them the inspiration to go out there and make it through their struggles. That's the top of the mountain. Money is only halfway up the mountain." We were talking about this while sitting in the closet-sized space of his studio, which is actually the 'living room' of his tiny apartment in western Tokyo. Muta, despite something that's probably closer to a 70-hour workweek, seems like a pretty happy guy.

But he wouldn't be considered a 'success' by Ferriss' standards, which, though they often remain implied, are only slight modifications on the Anthony Robbins "achieving greatness" vibe. Though Ferriss clearly has a (narrow) creative streak, and a hunger for new experiences, what he doesn't seem to have much of is capacity for or interest in reflection, either on himself or on society. Most obviously, he has no apparent use for art or culture. More subtly, his entire approach to life - scheduled and strategized to the nth degree - leaves no room for real leisure, aimless laziness, even boredom, all of which actually leave the space for new things to emerge.

It's not surprising, then, that Ferriss' books are both bestsellers - he appeals directly to the way our culture already works, to the values of the ruling class, basically defined by the desire to both live a materially rich life (iPad in one hand, four-dollar latte in the other), and also to be "fulfilled," whether that means climbing mountains or doing aikido in your free time. This "fulfillment" is rarely associated with, say, writing poetry or other creative pursuits, but instead by more quantifiable achievements - a fact Ferris has capitalized on, quantifying everything from his world-record in Tango to, in The 4-Hour Body, his utilitarian, mechanistic guide to the sex.

Now, like I said, I've drunk the kool-aid on much of this. There's a part of my brain that's very competitive, and I take pride in all of my accomplishments. Particularly, I'm proud my current situation, which, while temporary, is a version of Ferriss' own globe-trotting lifestyle, earned by doing what I love (you can see even there how much I, like Ferriss, love not-so-subtly touting my own achievements). Every success I have gives me a little jolt of endorphins - but as I get older, I've started to register just how quickly those doses wear off and every "achievement" begins to look like the new normal. It takes something far more profound and deep than success to get to that most elusive achievement of all - happiness. From reading Ferriss' book and seeing how he presents himself, he seems like a genuinely happy guy, and I'm sure that has fueled his success.

But I wonder what the relationship is between Ferriss' relentless achievement-orientation and his apparently genuine happiness. In The 4-Hour Body, he explicitly lays out his belief that achievement leads to confidence and from there, to happiness. But as others have pointed out, "achievement" can also become a framework for hilarious and pathetic self-delusion, and a distraction from the real substance of life. I can't yet say I'm practicing this - I pulled a ten-hour workday yesterday, followed by yoga - but even as I pursue some of the tips Ferriss provides in 4HB, I also want to recommitt to indolence, to aimlessness, to self-abandonment. I think they might be where the real joys of life lie.

The Hip-Hop Connection: Sumo, Drugs, and Those Darn Rappers.

2011-01-23T23:23:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday I was talking to my friend Terada of Deep Throat X, and the subject of marijuana came up. Despite the notorious severity of laws against marijuana possession in Japan (supposedly, a third of a gram can net you five years hard labor), it's nearly as much a part of hip hop culture here as it is in the States. What Terada told me, though, is that this nefarious influence is spreading throughout Japanese culture - most notoriously, into the world of sumo. Even non-Japanophiles might remember the round of 2009 busts that brought down a handful of Russian and Mongolian sumos - but what you might not have heard about if you, like me, weren't reading Japanese papers at the time, is that it was hip-hop that brought low these proud scions of Japan's national sport.

We must preserve the dignity of sumo . . . whatever the cost.

This article (Japanese, but I recommend the useful/hilarious/surreal Google translations provided by Chrome) recounts the claim of Shinichi Kirin, one of the low-ranking sumo arrested in 2009, that he got interested in ganja because he started listening to hip hop and, moreover, spending a lot of time in a hip hop store in Shibuya. The article has a passage worth quoting because it says so much about Japanese perceptions/knowledge of pot:

同容疑者は吸引方法についてこれまでの調べに「葉巻の中身をくりぬき、中身の葉を大麻と混ぜて葉巻に戻して吸っていた」と説明。県警幹部は「葉巻を大麻と同じように肺に吸い込むことは通常あり得ない」としており、県警は供述は不自然とみている。

Regarding the investigation thus far into the circumstances of the suspect's involvement, [the police] explained, "[The suspects stated] they emptied out the contents of a cigar, then mixed those contents with pot leaves and put them back into the cigar." The police have said that because "it is impossible to inhale marijuana and cigars in the same way," they believe this affidavit to be false.

Yes, we all have a lot to learn from the Japanese police.

Anyway, good old Japanese wikipedia (drawing, I'm sure, on the tons and tons of blogs out there to document this sort of thing) names names, connecting these events to the relatively unknown rapper D.O, leader of the crew 練マザファッカー [Fancy Motherfuckers]. Also implicated was the much more prominent You the Rock, who was already quite a celebrity, appearing in commercials, series, and variety shows when he was convicted to nine months in prison. As a result (and showing just how dramatically different Japan's hip hop world can be from America's) he announced his retirement from music, and at least as of last April was planning on living in Nagano and working as a hospital attendant (though even here, I doubt that's what has actually happened.

I haven't seen any mention of the name of the Shibuya hip hop store where this all went down. But even more than the details, what's arresting is the reinforcement of some ideas about hip hop that are probably still hazy at best in the minds of the older generation. Hip hop is widely seen as dangerous, edgy music, but the generation most invested in sumo - largely, those over 60 - are much less likely to be attuned to youth culture. People are more likely to know that hip hop is American music and, moreover, black music, so we're left here with some pretty basic math: black American culture is ruining sumo. Duh.

But in fact, far from being a nefarious foreign import popularized by negative images brought over from American inner cities, hemp was cultivated in Japan starting in 10,000 BC. Cannabis is burned in many Shinto ceremonies as a means of cleansing spaces of bad influence - much as salt is used to cleanse the sumo ring before each bout. Moreover, all of the paraphernalia (ahem) of the sumo match, such as the rope bounding the ring and the wrestler's mawashi belt, are traditionally made of hemp. And this is just hearsay, but apparently, at least at the amateur level, marijuana is treated as a kind of performance-enhancing drug for sumo, smoked immediately before a match.

Industrial-grade hemp is still legal to grow in Japan, and Hokkaido seems to be ripe with volunteer marijuana plants, but there seems to be little or no momentum for legalization of psychoactive marijuana. And why, you may ask, is this such a big deal? It's got nothing to do with hip hop, but like so many things in Japan, it turns out it is America's fault. Under the administration of Douglas MacArthur (aka Tha Dougfather), Japanese drug laws were made to square with their American counterparts. America had criminalized marijuana in 1937, but Japan hadn't quite caught up yet. MacArthur changed that, and now (again typically), the Japanese government remains doggedly committed to upholding the rules forced upon them by a nation that has, in the meantime, begun to figure out that those rules weren't exactly right to begin with.

Triune Gods - Canada-Japan-America Rap Collaboration

2011-01-23T21:53:00.000-08:00

Correction: As Otona-san from Granma was kind enough to point out, Bleubird is actually American, not Canadian. My bad!

I spent last Friday talking with Sibitt, of Origami, and the two guys who run Granma Music, who were down for the weekend from Saga, a smallish city nextdoor to Fukuoka. They were all here because of the release about a week ago of "Six Days, Seven Nights," an interesting new collaboration between Sibitt, the Canadian producer Scott Da Ross, and the American rapper Bleubird. They have some of the cooler cover art I've seen in a minute, and it should give you a good idea what they're about - weird, surreal, edginess.

If you're more into hearing actual music (what?) here's one of the two preview videos available:

(This video is in itself interesting - these super-condensed mixes are a pretty typical way for Japanese labels to promote new releases. When I asked the Granma guys if I could post a full track from the album, they did the rather patented Japanese hem-and-haw "I'm actually saying no but I won't say no" routine. Obviously there are good rationales for both of these methods, but I do think the 'megamix' actually cuts out audience participation in a kind of unfortunate way - for instance, I couldn't include the above music in a mix I was making myself.)

I was surprised to find out that Granma, based in what is pretty much a backwater of Japan, hasn't released any music from a Japanese artist before working with Sibbit - they've been very focused, it seems, on underground releases, many from Canadians. They've released records from Pip Skid and Skyrider (I believe this is The Skyrider Band minus Sole) - so, keeping the flame of indie-rap alive in dark times.

On the way to some delicious food at an izakaya called Iseya, which is completely filthy and sublimely delicious, we also stopped by Jar-Beat Records, a small shop that is, not unlike Saga and Granma, essentially in the middle of nowhere - Kichijoji is pretty far out there. I would guess Asa-san (the owner) does most of his business online, but they have frequent, pretty cool events that I'm hoping to keep on top of.

You can get "Six Days, Seven Nights" on the American iTunes store - just search "Triune Gods" and you'll find it for $6.93. That price becomes even more amazing when you realize the physical album will cost Japanese fans about Y2800, or more than thirty-five bucks. No, that's not a joke, except in a sort of cosmic sense.

Trash Humpers and Chill Waves: On The Way To The End

2011-01-22T07:16:00.000-08:00

"Just look around at this world, at the grisly facts of what so-called civilization has done to us . . . we are the slime and the goop."

Sitting here watching Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers, and it's amazing how much it has in common with the lo-fi psychedelic music I'm working with. It's an experimental film with no narrative structure, and in every sense it's a continuation of Kids - a depiction of the limits of human awfulness . . . but with something that is, if not heart, at least some seductive joy. The three central figures are three elderly people who run around drinking, destroying televisions, smashing the walls of old houses, mocking children, shouting their ignorance to the sky, putting razors in apples, and generally celebrating in the wreckage of capitalism (and yes, humping some trash).

What makes it so much like lo-fi psych is the difficulty of its causal loop, the impossibility of untangling base from superstrucuture. The malevolence of Korine's three central figures is the result of the desolation of the culture they're in the midst of - but the essential joy they take after having thrown off the limits of that culture prefigures a better future, if in some hideously deviant form. (The best representation of this comes early, when the three are rampaging through a parking lot gleefully smashing TVs and radios).

In much the same way, the likes of Washed Out and Neon Indian make lo-fi music at least in part because they're underemployed twentysomethings facing a bleak future - but that same cheapness helps prefigure a future that's better than the present, one in which we're moving away, backwards towards the acceptable cheapness and imperfection of a future past.

Lacan and Jonathan Zerzan: Alienation and Psycho-Normalization

2011-01-18T23:04:00.000-08:00

I'm reading the Mirror Stage essay again in preparation for teaching it today, and as often occurs (particularly with Lacan) I'm grasping it much more deeply this time around (and will likely grasp it even better the next time around). In particuar, I'm finding it very productive to go back to that essay after my first venture into the work of Jonathan Zerzan, who at first blush seems to have put into very clear terms many of the concerns and questions that have been driving me for years now, without my quite being able to articulate them.

The question that has dogged my reading of psychoanalysis is that of the political - when we read Freud's famous quotes that (paraphrasing) the goal of psychoanalysis is to change dysfunctional mental illness back into everyday human misery, or that the universality of civilization will mean the omnipresence of neurosis, are we hearing a lament, or a sanguine acceptance? Are the processes of repression, civilization, and symbolization described by Freud and Lacan universal constants to whose pains we must resign ourselves in exchange for greater benefits, or are they open to challenge?

Zerzan himself has some very clear positions on all of this (and is clearly strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, particularly Freud), but for now I just want to stick to the "Mirror Stage" as I warm up to class. I think that (despite Lacan's notorious opacity) there are points where it is clear he is quite critical of the process of socialization he's describing - certainly, more clearly critical than Freud ever was. Some of these are subtle, almost poetic - for instance, the description of the assumption of the specular self-image (that is, the leap to figuring out that thing in the mirror is me) in terms of putting on armor, or of a quest to enter "a lofty, remote inner castle" - martial imagery that doesn't bespeak a happy life.

Lacan occasionally suggests the situation might be constitutive and unavoidable, but even then he's quite clear that it's unpleasant. As he puts it, "the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation" - that is, from the fragmentation of the infant's experience to the adult's constant desire for a return to "wholeness" that will someday be achieved. But in that same passage, Lacan uses a crucial term - alienation, which he uses to characterize the assumption of the body in the mirror as one's own. Particularly given the essay's genesis after Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Englightenment, it seems safe to guess that Lacan used this term quite knowingly.

Perhaps Lacan's perspective shifted by the time of May 1968, when he would be accused of being a counterrevolutionary. But at least in this essay, it seems he was doing work that was, more than most people tend to grant, well athwart the progress of history, capital, and the mediatized world we now live in.

Bun - "Yurelu"

2011-01-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

During our chat on Monday, Yamaan insisted I check out a producer named Bun, affiliated with Oilworks Records. He doesn't seem to have a ton of stuff available online at the moment, but this short clip is really great. The music is extra abstract and melancholy, and I particularly love the video - a long shot of a completely shuttered shopping avenue, a site sure to become increasingly familiar in Japan in the coming years.

Yamaan - 12 Seasonal Music

2011-01-18T06:20:00.000-08:00

I sat down for a few minutes yesterday to talk with Yamaan, a producer affiliated with the Temple-ATS experimental hip hop crew, about his new album, 12 Seasonal Music. Yamaan has produced tracks for several Temple artists, as well as friendly artists Juswanna and Chiyori, a reggae/soul singer affiliated with the Mary Joy label. Chiyori actually joined us, as she did a couple of years ago when I first talked to Yamaan, partly because she's on the new album, and partly because she happens to be his girlfriend. There's going to be a more polished version of all of this going up at Tinymixtapes sooner or later, but I wanted to pass along some of the interesting tidbits from the interview, including info on Temple's history, the similarities between blues and ambient music, what draws a Japanese teenager from Yamanashi-Ken to Tokyo, and what it's like to grow up in a city built from the ground up for scientific research.

But first, here's "Sea," the album's summery 7th track:

The track reflects Yamaan's nostalgic, generally pretty sound - which is frankly a little strange considering where he comes from.

Yamaan went to high school with both Nanorunamonai, one half of Origami, KOR-One, another Temple producer, and the hip hop journalist Futatsugi Shin, who has become one of the most important catalysts bringing together hip hop and political radicalism in Tokyo. They grew up together in Tsukuba, which has a unique history. It was conceived and planned in the 1960s as a "Science City," a research hub that would drive Japan's technological development. This centrally-planned dimension make Tsukuba physically hideously Orwellian, but according to Yamaan it was a collection of "strange people," who all helped create the left-of-center viewpoint of the Temple crew very early on. While Nanorunamonai and Futatsugi put on hip hop events at their high school, Yamaan was busy playing drums in a punk cover band - in mid-1990s, bands like NOFX were apparently quite big here.

Chiyori has her own superhero-like origin story on the margins of conventional Japanese society. She grew up in Yamanashi, but was sure by the time she was in middle school that she wanted to pursue music as a career, and had no interest in going to college. This made attending a conventional Japanese high school silly, since these are basically oriented entirely towards the college entrance examination. Her parents (apparently pretty enlightened folks) sent her to a progressive boarding high school in Saitama, nestled deep in a forest and, as she put it, without rules. What the school did have were highly qualified expert teachers, including music teachers. After finishing high school, she moved again, and spent three and a half years living in a rented house and putting together a demo CD with DJ Muta, now a member of Juswanna. She moved to Tokyo about six years ago, eventually connecting with Mary Joy, who will release her second album soon.

Though they're a couple and frequently collaborate, Chiyori and Yamaan make quite different music - in addition to hip hop, he's heavily indebted to ambient music, citing Brian Eno specifically, while she considers herself to be in the blues tradition. When I asked them whether their music expressed their dreams of the good life, both said yes, though of course in different ways - while blues addresses the problems of the day with sympathy, ambient music tends to be about tuning out, forgetting. But both insisted there were common threads.

We also touched briefly on the interesting and unique system of CD rental shops in Japan, with the two musicians saying that they think the easy access to a diversity of music is good for creativity as a whole, but that some rental shops (particularly small independent ones) are run without proper licensing, and the proper revenue doesn't always make it back to artists - which, obviously, they opposed.

The conversation wandered and tripped along, but hopefully that's enough to get you interested for the eventual full-length article, and for Yamaan's album. You can download the entire album on Amazon Japan (American Amazon accounts won't work, but the setup process is quick and there's an English version of the Japanese site).

Finally, here's a taste of the lead single from 12 Seasonal Music, entitled 「旅する思い出」- something like "Tripping through Memory."

Taboo1 and Shibito - Gindan no Wakusei [Forbidden Planet]

2011-01-16T05:42:00.000-08:00

This is the lead single from Taboo1's Lifestyle Masta LP, which came out in October. I hadn't seen this before, but between the mind-bending video and great track, including some super-advanced style from Shibito, it's a must-check.