Night of a Thousand Horrors/Yada Nanimokamo!

Halloween here in NiHon = 3 parties for our students = 9 hours of work on Sunday (and work from 6-midnight Sat night) + mandated costume. I chose Oedipus, mostly because I wanted to wear the black 3D glasses that my old Japanese girlfriend stole from the movies for me, combined with blood dripping down underneath, at my band's next concert, and the next concert opportunity happened to be - conveniently - All Hallows Eve. That's right: right after my 9 hour worktacular funfest.

So, uh, helluva day from the getgo. Show up at work for 9:30, half-dead and jacked on coffee. Supposed to play games with the kids, but they mostly didn't understand, so we kind of winged it by the seats of our pants. Made a couple small kids cry - probably the combination of my slightly creepy costume + not understanding the English instructions. But what's Halloween without crying, anyway?

So, that + folding lots of trash bag "walls" from our haunted house (because in Japan, you're not allowed to throw anything away - we reuse all our paper on both sides, and even saved all the string from the giant spider web we made) = the rest of Halloween party. Then Jacob and I took off for his apt, to get our stuff to go to the show.

It's pouring now, possibly the delayed arrival of a typhoon that was rumored to come the night before. I still have my bloody facepaint on, and can luckily shield it from the rain with my umbrella. We make it to Jacob's - exhausted, but unscathed - and decide to call a taxi so we can cart our stuff to the live without dragging it through the rain. Also at this point my sock is soaking wet because my boot has grown a hole in the sole (if anyone remembers my taped up soles from my last pair of boots, you probably get the idea).

We get to the live (what we call concerts over here) ok, but Jenn, our violin player, is running late - she's coming back from one of her work trips, and her train's delayed from all the rain. We're supposed to go on second to last, but she won't make it in time, so we end up switching with the headliners. We're kind of the worst band ever - last time we had a show there was an accident and we had to take an extensive detour, and we were late for that too. Bad luck! Bad luck!

So we're allowed to switch, and Jenn finally shows up. Ok. But the bad luck doesn't stop there. The band before us is decent, but kind of plays like a pretty tight high school prom band. Considering we're like a made-for-Halloween band, I figure it's as good a precursor as any. Totally different sound, no pressure, odds are in our favor...

Well, I go to set up, and first thing I notice, the tambourine I have attached to my keyboard stand is broken in half. Ok, great. Not the end of the world, but it is pretty crucial for our cover of "Venus in Furs". So I spend some time re-tying it while the Japanese audience laughs at our ghetto setup. It survives the first song, but it's not like it matters, Jacob's guitar is so fucking loud nobody can hear anything but white noise for half of it. Not a great start (though pretty par for the course as far as our shows go).

The second song is "Venus," and that goes fairly better (after yet another tambourine shard re-tying), but Jacob skips the 4th verse without warning and leads to confusion and disharmonic playing for about 20 seconds. Could've been worse though, and by this point, we already look like a haphazard joke band anyway, so who cares if we fuck up a classic? Maybe for an encore we can do a 20 minute rendition of Freebird with a vocal arrangement of farts. And then I can light my keyboard on fire and never play another concert with this band again.

The third song is "The Jam," which originally started out as a jam, but after extensive attempts to turn 20 minutes of spontaneous fuckery into a condensed, cohesive song, it's no longer jammy and just a rambling piece of unpredictable weirdness, complete with long monotonous grooves and lots of unspecified note pounding. Last time we played a show this one was completely disastrous, and so comparatively this one is pretty sweet. Still, our violinist has technical issues with her amp (ie the house amp, since we have no real amps of our own - sound familiar?), and so it's not exactly "perfect"...but since there's no "real" way the song is supposed to play/end, I guess it's as good as most any other time we've run through it.

Next up is the very first song we ever wrote, "Lay Low the Lenses," which actually goes pretty well, but because Jacob has to switch to violin for it, the barowner thinks we're packing up/finished and turns the house lights and music on. We embarrassingly have to tell everyone "we're not finished yet! (we have more half-baked chicanery to subject you to!)" and ask them, in a moment of self-conscious awareness, whether they'd rather we play one or two more songs. A couple people say one, but Jacob says we should do two, and they're Japanese, so they don't argue.

It's probably better we do two, because "Lay Low" is a bit of an ego booster, and a nice warm up for the closer, my only song of the night (and personal favorite of all I've ever written): "Thanatos". We've never played it live before, though we have a pretty lucky, serendipitous camcorder recording of it on our myspace, where we just happened to play through it perfectly at practice one day. Rarely been able to do it since, and I'm skeptical we'll be able to tonight, especially since Jacob gave up on practicing it the day before, because he was too tired/hungover. He says he knows it already. I tell him if he fucks it up, I'll quit the band. We already have practice 2-3 times a week, and...well, you've read how embarrassingly amateur we are already. I'm pretty ready to call it quits either way, and this seems like as good a reason to do so as any.

But, incredibly, from the first notes, "Thanatos" is pulsing with the slow-burning tension it needs to really make an impact. Perfect pace, perfect playing. Jacob's sound is a little off, but it gives it a stripped down feel that's not totally inconducive to the atmosphere. Both Jenn and Jacob nail it, and it hauntingly flows exactly the way it's supposed to, right through the climax and through Jacob's spotlight riffs and into Jenn's closing ephemera, perfect for the close to a Halloween show. And the audience, previously laughing and jostling about the idiot gaijin band making a mockery of rock music before them, is hushed and sits attentively in the dark, waiting for the last ebb and flow of the meldoy to wash away.

So I can't complain (nor quit, for that matter), because the ending is spot on and we're able to save whatever face we have left at that point. We hang around for another 30 minutes as Jenn gets her car, thanking Kim-san (the barowner/guitarist for my favorite Japanese band, the gloriously glam-fuzzy Scandalar) profusely and striking bad Japanese conversations with the few concertgoers who didn't hightail it as soon as we finished (if not sooner - Though it's not like many of the five people I personally requested to come out actually showed up. Only one did - a girl who works at the local record shop - and she left before we finished, probably before hearing my song/the only nearly perfect song of the evening...)

Anyway, hanging out is probably the best part of the evening, because the day's obligations are FINALLY OVER and I can shoot the shit with Kim, who's usually pretty drunk at this point, and some other dudes, including a member of my old coworker Matt's sweet garage-pop throwback band, and some other random dude in a Yankees cap. I ask him if he likes the Yankees, and he says no: the NY stands for something else. He says it means "Yada Nanimokamo" in Japanese, which translates to "I hate everything," and he then gives a rousing though ultimately incoherent explanation of how he hates everything, yet accepts everything. He's obviously pretty drunk too, but that's ok, because I'm too busy thinking about how many NY caps I own and how much more interesting they'd be to wear now, with their new Japanese meaning in tow.

Finally, Jenn arrives to drive us and our stuff back. We're in Gifu - where Jacob and Jenn live - but she agrees to drive me back to Ogaki with my keyboard/stand/guitar/amp/various other equipment if I pay for her gas $. No problem! I tell her. She's going away for two weeks, and if I leave it at Jacob's place I might never see it again.

So I'm pretty stoked that she'll drive it back...but when we get to Jacob's, her car stalls and won't restart. It just makes a weird ticking sound, like someone rubbing a stick against a washboard. I tell her her battery might be dead, but we can't think of anyone with jump cables - in short, we're fucked. So instead of getting a marginally cheap ride back to Ogaki, I'm forced to drag my stuff up to Jacob's. I could leave it there for 2 weeks and take the train back, but I decide I'd rather get a taxi and carry it all back now. Jake says it'll cost about 60 bucks. Ok - just gotta go to the 24-hour atm first. With Jenn's help, I order a taxi and tell it to arrive in 15 minutes, then hightail it in the pouring rain to the atm.

Well, turns out 24 hours in Japan = until 24:00, or midnight. The atm is closed, and I only have 10 bucks on me. I run back to Jacob's and borrow 50 from Jacob, then another 100 from Jenn, because I fear the 50 won't be enough (and it's not). At least at this point, the paint has mostly washed from my face...But my palm burns, because someone accidentally waved their cigarette into it. Not so good!

Well, with a little more assistance from Jenn, I'm able to guide the taxi back to Ogaki/my apartment. 65 dollars later, I'm home sweet home, soaked, with a holey boot and a broken tambourine. BUT I also have a little bag of candy from our Halloween parties, complete with Tootsie Rolls, Now and Laters, Smarties and NERDS. This is especially welcome because I'm starving and have no food in my house. So I eat a bunch of candy and drink the rest of my beer and shochu (ie Japanese hard liquor).

Now it's 3am and my blogpost is finished. Yada Naminokamo! But not really - all things considered, I'm on a surprising high. Pretty tired though - time for a hot shower and some much-needed sleep.

So on that note: Happy Halloween, and oyasumi!

The Aichi Trienniale

Today I went to the Aichi Trienniale with my friend Mayu. Some of you may remember Mayu from my earliest visit to the Kobe Art Museum. Apparently she found my company entertaining, or I'm the only friend she has who enjoys art, because she invited me to this art festival in Nagoya. I'd been meaning to go myself, so I accepted. I figured it'd be good to get out of the apartment, do something different, see a new face. Break the solitary confinement that is Japan as of late...

Anyway, we went. It was fun. Saw a lot of neat contemporary art - and it was actually pretty good, something I can't say about all the art I see here - with some works by Yayoi Kusama of polka dot fame, as well as other cool works, like rings of falling water in a strobelight, set up so it looked like streams of sparkles in the dark, and if you looked at it in the right light, you could see individual drops of water, always falling and illuminated in the same place, as if frozen there. Very neat, on the most superficially entertaining of levels (not that there's anything wrong with that). Actually, I'm not sure I found any really "thought provoking" works - the closest one was a replica of a war plane covered in grains, as a protest of the way governments spend money on wars, when they should be spending that money on food for their poor (or something to that effect). Only problem is, the grains were all painted in bright colors, making the fighter look like a giant toy. Maybe it's just me, but all I could think was "cool plane!" - which kind of defeats the purpose of the critique. Maybe.

One of the last exhibits we saw was put on by a Yugoslavian artist name Natalija Ribovic, whose show was titled "Everyone is an eARThist" and involved a giant red inflatable rabbit, leaning on its arm and relaxing as if leaning against a tree or something. Drawings were all over the walls, in paint and marker, and the floor was covered in cardboard, where visitors had written messages to the earth, at the artist's request. I added "Best Planet Ever (at least that we know of so far)" - it felt kind of snarky, but it's hard to feel bad about things in Japan, because you're always doing something "wrong." Not to mention being depressed makes you generally not care about trivialities like other people's feelings.

So I go back to the entrance, and Mayu is talking with the artist, who is a pretty blond woman, maybe late 20s, who looks more Norwegian or Icelandic than Yugoslavian. Then again, when I asked where she was from, she said "My body was born in Yugoslavia, but my spirit is from Jupiter," so maybe that explains the incongruity. Needless to say, she was pretty wacky, but she spoke English and seemed to enjoy running into other people who spoke English, too. She explained to us that her works had 3 main characters - the rabbit and 2 others, I don't remember - and that there were 7 rabbits altogether, and together they represented 7 universal harmonies with nature, or something like that. She also showed us an extensive clothing collection she'd developed with North Face, to help save the earth or whatever. Sounded like a lot of commercial bullshit to me - and I remember the days when I thought art as commodity (a reversal from the Pop Art days) was so cutting edge! Blech.

So we got a good laugh out of her after we left, trying to decipher what the hell she was talking about, Jupiter and how "half the population of Iceland are fairies that live in the woods" and what not. But she was nice enough. Mayu had even left her her email and phone number and kept imploring to contact her if she wanted to set up a show in Nara (where she lives). Well, I guess that suggestion struck Natalija's fancy, because fifteen minutes later we get a call from her asking if we want to get dinner.

I've never been invited to dinner by an artist before. Hell, I don't even get invited to dinner by friends all that often. So that was pretty cool, and I had fun talking to her - she certainly was interesting. Asked Mayu whether she wanted a Christian vs. a Shinto wedding (wtf?) and kept going on and on about nature and how her body is just a vessel for artistic inspiration. I could even kind of understand that last point.

Alas, after about an hour we had to leave, so Mayu could catch last train. But it was a nice break in the monotony of life here, and it reminded me that I should really get on all the big artistic ideas I keep having and so rarely put into action. It also reminded me that sometimes there are advantages to speaking English in this country. It's a tradeoff: on the one hand, you're exempted from the soul-crushing social expectations; on the other, people stare at you and freak out when you try and talk to them.

It's good to remember just how crazy this place can be. But it perhaps bears contemplating whether it can drag you down with it. Natalija's been here 4 years and she's obviously gone batty. I'm only a year in and I'm already starting to lose it...
but as long as it's this kind of crazy, I think I can deal with it alright.