Proudly perpetuating the myth that all tokyo gaijins are batshit crazy

If you are looking for a heart-warming family-oriented feel-good movie to watch this week-end: 血と骨 is most definitely not it.

Time for some good old fashioned party report.

Sunday and Monday was Nagisa Music Festival and it was pretty damn cool.

One of the first nice thing about Nagisa is that it’s quite the value pack of music festivals. At ¥1,500 a day, you can hardly go wrong: we are talking cheaper than most regular club nights in Tokyo (certainly cheaper than the indecent ¥8,500 you’ll have to cough up for one single evening of Electraglide next month). At that price, one had to wonder where they cut the cost, and just hope it wasn’t on porta-potties or by using their home stereo to power the main stage. It wasn’t.

Essentially, I think, the low cost comes from a rather “modest” lineup, more fitting of a big underground rave than of a massive music festival. Only a few international names, with lots of local and smaller acts in the middle. Which is certainly nothing I would ever complain about: trust me when I tell you that most world-famous headliner DJs are nowhere near worth the effort. I wasn’t there last year, so couldn’t compare, but it seems the place wasn’t fully packed, likely due to the mediocre weather… There again not an issue as far as I was concerned: there were enough friendly smiles and energy to make it up entirely without having to elbow your way around to bust a move…

Music was overall good quality and enjoyable, even in fairly sober attendance mode: on the main stage, Kenji Williams was doing some nice tricks on a live electronica beat with a violin. Then this couple came on, and although they looked quite upbeat, they still seemed like middle-aged tourists that had just gotten lost on their way to the Meridien hotel next door. It took me forever to recognize System 7, and even after they tore the non-existent roof off with the perennial Alpha Wave track, I was still not convinced they were the same blokes I had seen a decade ago playing with Richie Hawtin: man, if the scene and the drugs do that, good thing I’ve stopped already. Anyway: very talented and led to hours of frenzied jumping around rhythmically.

Less talented, on the other hand, was Mr. François Kevorkian (aka François K). It’s now been about four or five times I saw him live and… while he sure is a worthy producer with a few awesome tracks, the man still can’t match a beat to save his life. One would think after 20 years, he would finally have it down pat… How he still manages to get booked with that major headliner status he enjoys in Japan, is beyond me. Or rather, it’s just yet another example of that asinine push by the public to make DJs out of producers and vice-versa. When he broke continuity for the twentieth time with some very forgettable minimalist techno, we called it a quit and went around to check out the Trance stage. Which says a lot when you know me and the seething hatred I usually keep for the genre.

Truth be told, the Trance stage around 7pm-9pm (Tokage and Ta-Ka, according to the schedule) wasn’t half bad. Some of the latter stuff sounded more like electro-ish techno than the usual cybercrap fare you usually get in the city. The small House stage also had a really nice Deep set going on, but unfortunately a rather weak sound system and perhaps a slightly less than energetic crowd, which dampened the ambience a bit.

All along, the usual suspects had finally all made it there. First Deny wearing an orange beacon visible from miles away, then Madoka and her party gang and finally the one and only Last Samurai, in between two glamourous fashion shootings and preparation for his eurotrip (getting lost in Paris’ public transit as we speak, if everything went well).

Only small downside of Nagisa was its strange “two days broken in two” setup, which makes things end unfathomably early (9pm) each day, with nothing but the afterparty at Ageha (wasn’t tempted at all) in between. The Plan was to go home, sleep sound and get there early the next day. But then The Plan got acquainted with Reality, in the form of a work-related phone call at 8am, reminding him that Monday wasn’t a bank holiday in other parts of the world, and that some emergency had to be dealt with. Thus, working until past 7pm and by then noticing the miserable weather all over Tokyo, I cowardly traded David Morales for my comforter and a hot chocolate.

Made the best out of Sunday anyway: even managed to catch an extra 30 minutes on the official closing schedule, in some smaller indoor stage (inside a giant teepee) where the DJ had the awesome taste of closing with the best club track of all times. Not so much drinking (for me, at least), but hours of dancing as I had not done in many weeks now… Which reminded me I really need to get out and do it more often these next two months.

There are a few blurry pics of the day in the keitai logs, Deny took heaps too: I’ll upload them as soon as she gets around to sending them.

YUM!
〓Tracey〓

明日また

System 7

Enzo was one of the first people I met in Japan… 3 years ago…

On why she couldn’t recognize a friend of mine she had met a week before:

You know, gaijin faces all look the same to me.

Anybody in charge of that Web 2.0 thing?

I feel it’s time I tell you about my business plan for http://p.et/s.

This time around, we’ll be using AJAX and RSS technologies. You won’t have to reload a single page to order your dog food. Just. Brilliant.

Please send your contributions to the first round of funding via Paypal.

I rarely (read: never) bore you with the minutiae of my daytime occupations; and for good reasons: they aren’t all that fascinating.

Actually, some of them are, but I’m too much of a sissy to risk getting dooced just to bring you tasty anecdotes of the life of an aspiring genius salaryman gaijin in Tokyo, so these will have to wait until I’m out of sight from Japanese shores.

In the meantime, I thought I’d point you to a few of the small side-projects I’ve been involved in, over the past year or so. If only because I couldn’t skip such a perfect occasion to reinforce my public image as a tree-hugger pinko commie with a taste for artsy schmaltzy stuff.

Neither one of these site I consider the pinnacle of my coding skills (some of the HTML markup isn’t even mine), but I thought they deserved a little mention here:

ForestAlert.org:

The first website is for a non-profit organization called ForestAlert.org, that deals with the problem of illegal logging and timber trade. The ruthless exploitation of non-renewable timber resources in third-world countries threatens to annihilate entire regions: destroying millenia-old primary forests, their ecosystems and the indigenous tribes that depend on them… Usually to end up as construction material in Japan or copy paper in about every other corporate office in the world.

ForestAlert.org is aimed at drawing attention to this problem, by continuously reporting on ongoing illegal activities condoned by public companies, exposing the global trade mechanisms that allow this traffic and tippin you on some easy steps you can take in your everyday-life to help prevent this ecological disaster.

Currently, the focus is on trade currents between Asian countries (Indonesia, New Guinea, Japan) and content is bilingual (English and Japanese), but the site is slowly extending its reach to cover every area of the globe.

Note that ForestAlert.org doesn’t ask for any money, just a bit of your time and some help spreading the word.

Pinx Photo:

In a much lighter tone, I also gave a hand to our very own Samurai Atsushi’s management agency: you can now see the work of a few talented Tokyo photographers and stylists on Pinx Tokyo’s official website. That includes Mr. Atsushi Nishikiori himself, on his way to become the Helmut Newton of the East.

Don’t be frightened by the few kanjis here and there: one doesn’t need to speak a word of Japanese to browse and appreciate the pretty pictures in all their glossy photographic CSS glory.

This one dedicated to Jeff:

I was enjoying a peaceful late lunch and tea break at the small eatery next-door with E., somewhere between lovemaking session #5 and arguing session #253, when a noisy discussion, one table over, draw our attention:

Three obatarians were seated, twice as many teapots in front of them, loudly and excitingly commenting over what looked like exercise sheets scattered on the table. From the style of the exercises and the tone of their comments, it seemed like at least one of them was learning how to write kanjis: a peculiar explanation, seeing how they all sounded positively natives, with little chance of belonging to the 1% illiterate people in Japan.

But then, listening more carefully to their attempt at pronouncing strange guttural tchaw’s and yow’s and taking a closer look at their papers, we realized they weren’t working their Japanese kanjis: these little old women were indeed feverishly teaching each other Korean. At that point, I could clearly see the ghost of Bae Yong Joon hovering above the table and reflecting into their glistening pupils.

I suppose until that moment, I had woefully underestimated the spread of Yong-sama-mania among the greying Japanese masses, but E. confirmed that even her aging slightly xenophobic grandma had all but started to learn Korean, secondary to that mop-head single-handedly bringing Korea to the forefront of sappy insipid drama production for the Asian market.

And I naively thought that peace and understanding between countries would have to be slowly built over mutual respect and appreciation for millennia-old cultures.

Let Z be a euclidean space of dimension equal to or less than your house, let X be the finite set of all razor handles you can extract from Z.

We can postulate there exists an infinite number of mountable razor blades within Z and not a single one of them will fit your fucking handles.

Extension of Z to the bathroom aisle of your local supermarket is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.

Found my entire tie rack behind the couch where it had fallen two months ago.

Never quite bought this whole “necktie-eating monster” explanation anyway…