You know it might be time to seriously reconsider your whole approach to pain management… when you find yourself at 4am, shaking and shivering like a smack addict in full withdrawal, snorting pharmaceutical opiates out of the capsule, because you can’t keep down a sip of water, let alone a pill.
Category: Life of a Starving Genius
Kidney + Stones
I will not be around for a few days. Regular programming should resume shortly (hopefully).
Typhoons, Birthdays and Karaoke…
Dear reader,
Our absent-minded blogger has inadvertently mismatched all his legends, will you be able to give each of the pictures above its appropriate description?1There’s a trap!
1. Sunny post-typhoon Kyoto bike ride along the Kamogawa.
2. Aya, post-typhoon-karaoke-night, posing in front of an unusually agitated Ducky River.
3. Late-Summer fire-sale on fireworks (¥200 for a full pack of rockets!?!) and planned excursion to Nara this week, should have the deers worried for their sleep.
4. Birthday tabe-nomi-hodai, followed by drunken antics at Philippe’s, followed by even more drunken (and hazier) antics at World’s.
Obon Weekend and then some…
Dear Online Diary,
My Obon weekend was quite cool. So cool in fact, that I barely even took a picture. Here are whatever few random moments I managed to capture, and I’m sure you’ll make your imagination work for the rest.
Love,
Dave from Kyoto
Featured: 1.2.3. End of night at Sonic Mania. 4. Outdoor lunch with Jus’. 5. Babies: My friends haz them. 6. Napping all afternoon in Yoyogi park. 7. Aliza’s awesome beach birthday in Biwako 8. As a special extra: quick snaps of yesterday’s rock concert at Tranq room…
Not featured: lots of drinking and round-up of the usual Tokyo places, driving through the streets of Tokyo at 1am, soaking in the Japanese Alps and much more…
Kyoto Ego Massive…
KJM‘s Shuya Okino played some damn cool tunes, yesterday at Metro…
But seriously, what’s with the rockstar entourage thing?
Staff rushing to fetch the official record-bag carrier when Mr. Okino decided to head for the exit, half a dozen groupies in tow?!
Guys, this is broken-beat/jazz house, not 1980s arena rock… Sure, he is good, but still only a couple steps removed from what your grandma listens to on 94.2 Smooth Jazz FM.
Sonic Mania 2011: Rant in Meh minor.
I should preface this somewhat-less-than-glowing review of Sonic Mania (aka Summer Sonic for people who dance at night) by mentioning one important detail:
I don’t really like music festivals.
More exactly, I don’t like a certain kind of music festivals (that kind). I think I have spent enough of my youth, dancing half-naked on Californian beaches or through Black Rock Desert that I don’t need to defend my record of appreciation for spontaneous music-oriented gatherings. I just still can’t figure the draw with mainstream music festivals: horrible acoustics, quantity-over-quality line-ups and uninspiring settings.
If I wanted to dance in the middle of stadiums, I’d be a football cheerleader.
Acts at major music festivals fall into two categories: bands that were cool 20 years ago (and whose sole surviving member badly needs to pay his taxes) and up-and-coming bands you will hear a 100 times better at a smaller, more targeted venue. The packaging of the two together, along with laundry-detergent levels of sales/marketing based more on PR momentum than musical coherence (complete with nonsensical stage schedules) are what make music festivals such a profitable deal for major industry players and a miserably pointless experience for everybody else.
Sonic Mania certainly followed that pattern. In fact, every other headliner on the line-up could accurately be summed-up as: “That guy you’ve never heard of, with ties to that band you definitely knew [and perhaps liked], back in the 2000s/1990s/1980s”…
Considering how much whining is liable to follow, I should add I had a perfectly OK night, fun even. But my enjoyment of the event was entirely down to being with a cool group of people and, most importantly, being comped and not having paid 10,000 of my hard-earned yens to attend that semi-debacle of a festival night. I feel I kinda owe it to the poor saps that paid out of pocket to let the world know what passes for top-yen-worthy festival in Japan these days…
10pm-ish: Arrival, Primal Scream
Holiday Weekend
Kicking off Obon holidays with Aya-chan at Canal Café. Later heading out to Sonic Mania with some guestlist love. Life has been worse.
Deutsch Chroniken, Teil 2
Now with 100% more cats…
Friday, a visit to my favourite supah-cheap shōjin-ryōri bar-restaurant in Shijo and its in-house friendly feline, triggered a chain of increasingly cat-oriented events on Saturday.
After taking Aya and Naomi, her friend visiting from Vancouver, to check out on the Philosopher’s Cats (and Ginkakuji while we were at it), it was decided that the cat quota for the day had not been reached and I followed two increasingly restless cat-addicts to my first ever Neko Kafé.
Actually, the place was pleasantly more like somebody’s living room with a lot of cats, than “café”… The little critters were unsurprisingly adorable, and the range was pretty broad: from disgustingly postcard-cute 1-month old kittens, to aging ojiisan cat, with all stripes and shapes in between (Hitler-moustache included).
All in all, a reasonable deal at ¥500 an hour, if only for countless memorable pictures of Aya and Naomi, in full crazy-cat-ladies mode, playing and cooing at little purring balls of furs.
#dontfuckwithbreakfast
Note to Japanese makers of breakfast cereals: toasted rice barely belongs in granola mix. And it certainly shouldn’t make up for 80% of its fucking content.
You are not being as subtle as you think you are, with your grubby little corner-cutting scheme.