Notes to Delf

Topics I hope to cover in the next few days -

-Why doesn't Tokyo, by some measures the biggest city in the world, have more culinary diversity? What does the fact that you can buy Thai food easier in the States than Tokyo, which is a few thousand miles closer to Thailand, say about the racial politics of Japan?

-I've never been really attracted to Asian girls. How will being in a city with basically nothing but for more than a month affect that? I mean, I gotta stare at something.

-Japanese thug rappers. Harlem. Of course.

BEAR CLAW!!

It'll probably show up all the way at the bottom of the page, but eff it, this is way too incredible not to share with the absolute maximum possible number of people.



In other news - the perspective of actually being an exchange student, rather than being the one manipulating and playing psychological games with the exchange student, is a switch. There was this Iranian kid (literally, like 17 years old) who I lived with for a while. The first english phrase he knew, thanks to some people in my house, was "Fuck the Police, coming straight from the underground." Somehow I doubt the Japanese here are having similar fun at my expense. They're way too polite for that. But nonetheless, it's very easy for me to imagine myself as a semi-absurd Apu-type character with limited command of the native language, smiling benignly when faced with roadblocks to getting my point across. I don't have much in my arsenal other than bumbling and stuttering and sighing, frankly.

Lots of new photos at Flickr.

Yamatsuka EYE is the future of dance music.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting when I went to see the mastermind of BOREDOMS DJing in Tokyo. The band he's best known for helming is a noise/rock institution on par with Sonic Youth, so one thing for sure I wasn't particularly expecting was a wall-to-wall-orgy of top-notch house, disco, and electro, but that's what I got. The music this man was throwing out was utterly uniform in its structural and thematic perfection. Like stacking one diamond on top of another. It didn't hurt that, once you got past the unbelievable cover charge, the club's drink prices were downright holy - I was slinging Hennesy down my throat all night, as fast as it would go, at about $4.50 U.S. a pop.

Anyway, the music - that's where it's at, right? Like I said, four-on-the-floor with a degree of simultaneous focus and inventiveness that very nearly literally blew my mind. It was disco/house, yes, but something about the sound . . . something under my skin, under the vinyl's skin . . . made it more than anything I've ever heard or felt in a club in the States. The video was probably essential to the experience, a situationist mashup of advertising animation, antiquated music-video dance numbers, and sci-fi themes that I can in no way come close to replicating in words. The spaceships stuttered backwards to capture DNA helixes amongst cavorting ostritch cartoons. Cascading diagrams of insole-reinforcement schemes were manically intercut with tooth-brushing instructions. It was easily the most psychedelic shit I've ever seen, if I'd been Exing I'm sure I would have shit a twelve-pound diamond in my shorts.

And I've mentioned the music, but it's hard to get a grip on. Though essentially housey, there was a rock-bottomed nature to all of it that I have almost never heard before - organic drums looping. And over the top? More optimism than can be contained in a short stack and a cup of regular. Electro sounds, like I said, but without the clash, just joy. Squirts and blurps and what have you. For the greater good.

Yamatsuka EYE fOCKING ROOLSZ.