As announced previously, I shall soon take on my next intercontinental move. And with it, comes the quintessential thrice-a-decade shot at Zen-Buddhist enlightenment, by shedding my lowly physical existence of all the useless materialistic junk I have accumulated over the past few years.

Put simply: I wanna travel light, when I leave in December. We all know that is not going to happen, but if at all possible, I would love to avoid reiterating last September’s episode of little old me, in the middle of Narita airport, handing over copies of Nietzsche’s Morgenröte and Russell’s History of Western Philosophy to hapless passersby, in a desperate effort to bring my luggage somewhere closer to the maximum weight allotted (including the extra 50% charitably granted by a sympathetic airline employee).

This Autumn cleaning, though, is more about uncluttering my life, getting rid of things I would never consider giving up, just making sure I keep my addiction to shiny baubles and uselessly expensive clothes under control. This is my own personal version of zen detachment: splurge on mindless consumeristic shopaholism for a few years, then strip it all down to three suitcases, the moment I skip the country.

And don’t think for a second that I am the unmaterialistic, happy-to-live-off-water-and-air, sort of guy: not only am I ridiculously attached to my things, but I also have this near-clinical tendency to pack every single bit of paper, receipt, bill etc. in the vague hope they’ll be of some use one day.

In this spirit, I have decided to offload my camera. Not any camera, mind you, but my faithful old Lomo Lubitel 166U.

Saying the любитель 166U was made by the Leningradskoye Optiko Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie (Leningrad Optical Mechanical Union) in the early 80’s should give you an approximate idea of what we are dealing with. It was bought for less than $20 equivalent in roubles in a rather decrepit Moscow store, about 10 years ago. Although brand new then (came in a sealed box), it had already been sitting there for a good decade. Much like these rumoured Kalashnikovs made entirely of ceramic so as not to trigger metal detectors, this camera is pure plastic (with some glass for the lenses).

The Lubitel has made its reputation ever since as a cheap amateur camera that lets you easily take somewhat blurry artsy overexposed shots of people, without needing much of a formal training. Truth is: if you are half a photographer (Goddess knows I’m not, but having been assistant to one, I know the basics), you can take very decent pictures. Given proper conditions you might even come out with great pictures (the kind you usually only get with a $4K Swiss-sounding camera brand). It uses 2″1/4 rolls and a pretty wide aperture at its maximum setting, which means even your most underexposed mundane pictures will come out looking like the work of some seventies New York photographer if you squint a little.

As for me, I used it as my party camera: while the number of settings (all manual, of course) would usually be enough to confuse the most sober photographer, it turns out that overlooking most of them and just plain point-and-shooting with the focus on infinity gives, in 9 times out of 10, a very satisfying result. The tricky part was always to remember to advance the film manually. In fact, more than tricky, it’s damn near impossible, when down to your last 10% of neuron supply and pupils the size of a 500 yen coin, to spot the small, barely visible, indicator on the back of the camera that lets you see the numbers printed on the back of the film… My solution was to go by an approximate count and hope successive exposures wouldn’t overlap, that is: when I even thought of advancing the roll altogether. The results were often, to say the least, experimental (lots of double-exposures, some of them really neat).

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Do you feel it too?

This warm and fuzzy feeling of well being all over your body, the sensation you are constantly swimming through mellifluous pink cotton clouds, this uncanny inclination toward benevolence and understanding when confronted to the vast dumbness of this world…

It’s seasonal…

Yep: cough-syrup season is upon us!

Party tidbit from years ago…

dr Dave: - You know: Pandas…
About that whole “nearly-extinct-but-won’t-fuck-behind-bars” problem…
I wonder… What if you just fed the pandas a few E’s?

Brian: - Bah… They’d probably just go into a corner and pet their own fur for hours.

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.

Chalk it up to a simple equation involving roughly 2 weeks of time, 50 pages of yet-unwritten report and 500+ pages of reading material… Blogging just hasn’t been a priority round here lately.

What has been a priority, though, was the quest for any combination of chemical aides, likely to make the required 250 hours of studies in 10 days, a technical, if not quite reasonable health-wise, possibility.

Thus, in the spirit of killing two heart-attacks with one stone, and without further ado, the first episode of:

Dr Dave’s Guide to Chemically-Enhanced Studying in Japan

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The definition of cruel is when your friends, over at your house for some lo-key, yet highly inebriated, bbq dinner, drunkenly (and unwittingly) opened that one very special bottle of Piper Heidsieck Special Millesime.

No. Hold on. Cruel is when it turns out they drank but a glass and left a full uncorked bottle sitting there for you to mourn in the morning.

Inhumanly cruel, is when all this takes place in the middle of your shot at reaching ascetic enlightenment, and subsequent self-imposed ban on all forms of alcohol consumption.

If I end up not drinking off that bottle today, I will personally write in a demand for a medal from the British National Temperance League.

Breaking with that old personal habit of favouring vices over addiction, I decided today that it was high time to resume heavy drug use for a while. And since methamphetamine is so damn expensive round here, I naturally turned to the second best option: Caffeine.

The deal is: I never drink coffee. Or hardly ever. Save for the odd cup or two when meeting people in a coffeeshop (and that’s only because the local Starbucks employees still refuses to this day to serve me Mojitos, even when I am ready to bring my own bottle of Rum). But coffee in the morning (i.e.: before 8pm) is a rarity.

Because of my complete non-addiction to caffeine, and since I still have my old hardcore coffee drinker habits, dosage-wise, those rare instances where I fix myself a cup usually result in uncontrollable twitching and borderline dizziness for most of the day.

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Hanami Parties Update

or “Welcome to My weekend, my life.com”

If reading the semi-coherent recollection of a drunken stranger’s week-end is not part of your Monday schedule, feel free to just gawk at photographic evidences, conveniently gathered here and there, including the perfunctory tits shot, courtesy of our dear Tracey…

In a scene telling of the spirit of this week-end, yours truly and three of his drunken groupies were seen yesterday night, fiercely decided to rock out the last train out of Harajuku, the same way they’d been rocking out Yoyogi park all afternoon: with lots of drunken debauchery and deep house beats blaring on a portable sound system.

If that’s not yet doing it for you, picture, if you will: the whitest, skinniest guy this side of Brooklyn, manning the most improbable Japanese ghetto blaster ever seen on the Tokyo metro, while the ladies managed to send the poor few salarymen present into abyss of despair: if even the ever-reliable subservient Japanese female could be spotted pole-dancing in a subway car, who was to tell what would be next. But the most awesome part was definitely the widespread toe-tapping around the car: people seemed to, in fact, kinda like it.

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Party announcement at the bottom »

How do you do when you completely and unabashedly forgot an ex’s birthday? With no valid excuse whatsoever, if only a very busy day and a genetic inability to remember dates correctly (I swear I thought it was tomorrow). And don’t tell me suck it up, apologize and get a nice gift: she’s quite the vindicative type too. After all, she made sure to wait until the following morning at 8am to inform me that I was officially an arsehole… you know, just making sure I had no wiggle room for white lies…

Which brings me to the problem of my day so far: what to do…

Which you probably do not give a rat’s ass about. And truthfully, who am I to blame you.

But let’s not ruin the mood. I guess we’ll just have to double the usual morning tequila sunrise and consider our quota for public humiliations and shameful exposures fulfilled for the whole month. And that’s always a good thing: you don’t really want to stock up on past dues for these kind of quota.

Cue mandatory sakura blossom speech.

Everybody will have, by now, noticed that the sakura blossom is upon us. At least I know I have. But I would have little excuse, seeing how every other street in my neighbourhood instantly turned a rosy white color and I no longer see my breath upon waking up (which means either one of two things: my new toothpaste is working much better than the previous one. Or it’s getting warmer). That, and also half the trains on the Yamanote have been busy giving day-by-day updates about the state of the sakura front (unlike, say, some people who could have at least hinted that there was an important upcoming date, last time we talked).

There are basically two schools of hanamist:

Some will defend the inscrutable beauty and zen symbolism of the spectacle, and take comfort in their ephemeral regularity, seemingly changeless, yet each time unique. Those people, particularly the gaijin among them, will tend to grow copious amount of facial hair and put on traditional samurai armors to charge at locomotives on their horse, thus ensuring an edifying finale where they can get a last dying glimpse at the sakuras down below, before heading out for the land of their ancestors.

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Hunter S. Thomspon killed himself today.

Damn, it’s like the loss of a spiritual father.

Here is what he had to say about this poor excuse for a President.

‘been a very long time since I have posted anything about Tokyo’s most notorious pit hole… Time to fix this oversight!

Legend has it that, back in 1929, one of the few guys to make money off the market crash – Joseph Kennedy Sr., I believe it was, but the name hardly matters since this story is probably made-up anyway – was wise enough to take all his marbles off the playground before it sunk, when he overheard shoeshine boys in the street exchanging stock tips.

If 15-year old shoeshine boys start investing in the stock market, was his thinking, it’s high time to get the hell out and start selling short. He was right, and his clairvoyance pretty much built the Kennedy’s fortune and indirectly resulted in Jackie getting a very heavy dry-cleaning bill, thirty years later in Dallas.

Of course, while Economics 101 textbooks love to give you this fairy tale as an illustration of the danger of uninformed speculation, the truth more plausibly resides somewhere in Joseph Sr.’s arm-length records of insider trading and stock pulling. Hell, he might even have been one of the guys giving that last tip to a stock market teetering on the edge for months.

Then what is the moral of this story, I hear you ask. And more importantly, what the hell does it have to do with Roppongi?

Well, a modern day version could be thus: When you start bumping into pimply junior-high-schoolers while ordering drinks, it’s really time to get the hell out.

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Now… Since you are reading this, and probably other blogs too, I think we can safely infer that you belong to that category of people who get their secret kick out of hearing how miserable other people’s lives are.

Don’t pull that innocent face: you know who you are.

And I don’t blame you.

I’m with you on that one: sure, fuzzy pictures of playful kittens might bring some warmth to even the most hardened seaman’s heart… But only the news that some stranger at the other end of the world is having a really shitty day can bring true, lasting, peace of mind. Why do you think I have my PubSub keyword watchlist set to include “I cut because my life sucks” and “suicidal thoughts”: you never know when somebody’s unhappiness is gonna come handy to reinforce your own precarious sense of happiness…

With that knowledge, allow me to humbly feed your shadenfreude with this little story of tragi-comical woes in the land of technology…

We are talking movie material here.

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And now, award time for most moronic idea of the month, with automatic entrance to the yearly draw.

If you are gonna be cheap enough that you keep old bottles of top-shelf vodka prominently disposed behind your bar to try and give it that international hip flair it quite obviously hasn’t… At least:

1. Make sure your new barmaid is aware they aren’t the real thing.
2. When picking a transparent liquid to refill the bottles with, use water, not fucking bleach.

Will I come out as an insensitive cold-hearted bastard if I publicly lament here the fact that all things interesting and exciting only happen in Japan when I’m not there, stuck six thousands miles away, in a city where major earthquakes, flood and other cool natural disasters are about as likely as a shred of human soul mistakenly finding its way into Dick Cheney’s corpse…

On that count, Paris is quite boring.

I am told the floods of yore, when the as-of-then-undomesticated Seine river expanded its bank to all surrounding neighbourhoods, were a vision of surrealistic awe. What with the people, bank clerks and congressmen alike, having to swim their way back from work, French baguette in one hand, cigarette in the other and beret on top.

OK, perhaps the congressmen didn’t have to go freestyle swimming, but surely there couldn’t be enough boats for everybody…

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As promised, here is a first update on the progress of the previously mentioned no-roommate project.

And I am ashamed to say that there isn’t much progress altogether.

You see, after briefly considering adult movie-making or experiments in urban anchoretical life as chief occupations for my week-end, I finally settled on a much more pedestrian — yet of proven entertainment value — plan. A plan essentially centered around a few easy concepts such as: alcohol (preferably cheap and plentiful), friend(s), cultural exploration of new neighbourhoods (through random sampling of bars and izakaia) as well as, potentially, use of substances and sex (on same requirements as alcohol).

In that case, you may ask, why am I sitting in front of my laptop on a friday night, typing this while most obviously not partaking in any of these activities. And that is a very legitimate question.

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