Shibuya
Blasted Slitherlink. I was just about awake at 8:30am, but by the time I managed to drag myself away from the game and have a shower, it was past 3pm. This would never have happened if Debbie had been here.
I had a decadently Western club sandwich with potato wedges in the hotel restaurant, on my way out.
With the afternoon wearing on, my plan was simple:
- Go to Shibuya
- Visit Tower Records and spend some time at the J-Indie listening posts
- Buy a paperback for the flight home, from Tower Records’ import books floor
- Stash purchases, coat and camera in a station locker
- Watch some live music
- Retrieve stashed stuff
- Go home
I was surprised at how well this plan worked.
I’m slowly growing accustomed to Japanese alphabetisation, or syllabaryisation I suppose. Things are sorted by kana, so (I think) artists beginning with ぼ (”bo”) are between ほ (”ho”) and ぽ (”po”). This is how I found the Boris section and ended up buying their Droneevil double CD set. It may be a while before I get to enjoy this properly, since it employs the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka gimmick — “please play these two CDs simultaneously through separate stereo speakers”.
I also bought a legitimate copy of Boris and Chokoku no Niwa’s More Echoes, Touching Air Landscape, since I’ve had so much pleasure from the MP3. I toyed with buying an album by Vola & The Oriental Machine, which was on a listening post and sounded pleasantly post-rock, but I try not to buy more than two CDs at once, because inevitably if you buy too many, none get the attention they deserve.
The book floor at Shibuya’s Tower Records is really rather remarkable. Its stock of English language books would put many British and American bookshops to shame. The prices are not significantly higher than you would expect to pay in Britain.
It also has a wide range of English language magazines — including British gaming magazine Edge (not to be confused with the American gay publication of the same name!). Edge reports breathlessly on the contents of Japan’s video arcades. I wonder what a Japanese gamer would make of it.
I browsed the fiction section for a while. I am terrible at bookshops. Although I skim through the book section of the paper, I never make sufficient note of the books that look interesting, so really I can only spot household name authors, or books with eye catching covers.
Today I also had an eye on size. I wanted something small but dense, in paperback, for the perfect weight to in-flight entertainment ratio.
It goes to show my literary ignorance, that I thought I had bought a cutting edge modern satire set in Stalinist Russia. It turns out that Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was completed by his wife shortly after his death in 1940. Penguin fooled me with their modern cover design and sketchy fly-leaf bumph. It looks like an easy and entertaining read, however, and it will be a boon to my Russia studies, so maybe in time I will be grateful to Penguin for their deceit.
On my way out of the shop I picked up a copy of The Tokyo Weekender, a free weekly publication for English speaking ex-pats. Examining it over a pumpkin cheesecake and a coffee, I found it peculiar. The lead article was about where to find a proper roast beef dinner in Tokyo. The idea of living here and pursuing the trappings of British culture is strange to me, yet I wonder whether if I did live abroad, I would seek out that link to the old country. It’s interesting to think about immigrant communities in Britain in this light.
–
Station lockers are heavily used, and it took a little rooting around to find a free one. I stashed everything that would restrict me in a rock venue, fretted briefly about the possibility of losing the key, then set of in search of a venue named Tau Kitchen.
I did not find Tau Kitchen, but in the process of searching, I saw some kids filing into a doorway. Since I had chosen Tau Kitchen more or less at random anyway, I verified that they were queueing for music, and went for it. This time I was in before 6pm, so I was able to see the first band.
On the Palette were OK. They were young and have time to develop. It seems Tokyo has a never-ending supply of excellent guitarists, and On the Palette had one of them. The songs were fine, as far as I could tell (I can’t judge the lyrics!). What was needed was a bit more showmanship.
The first slot is obviously a foot-in-the-door slot. The first band on stage often seem to be handing out free demo CDRs. Maybe yesterday’s Super Girl’juice were a similar act. Still a shame though.
For the next act, the venue suddenly filled up. Bivatehee had fans. Most were teenage girls. Several were wearing the band’s t-shirts, and when the performance started, they actually danced enthusiastically and waved their arms in the air, and knew the words to the songs.
Bivatchee were a punk band in the vein of Blink 182. The singer, unconstrained by an instrument, put on a terrific show, leaping into the audience, singing from atop a fan’s shoulders, and bringing a girl on stage to mime playing guitar.
The next act was a solo singer-songwriter, with an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. I hope he was an incredible lyricist, because his guitar playing was workmanlike at best. The audience were either rapt or polite, I couldn’t quite tell which. He is on the ticket as “ザマスミサイル” — “za masumisairu.” (Update: ザマスミサイル is “Mass Missile” — I didn’t see them. This must be a stand-in.)
The headliner was Fetish the World. I have no idea how they settled on that name. They were promoting a new album named Walking in the Rain. It could be that I couldn’t be bothered to force my way to my spot near the front, having bought a beer at the back, but they failed to hold my attention. In fact I found myself musing over a t-shirt design which would only be worth wearing if I were to meet Stewart Lee in person*.
They pulled out all the stops for their last song, which featured powerful guitar lines reminiscent of The Bends era Radiohead. Nonetheless, they left to polite applause.
Everything was wrapped up by 9:40pm. Sunday hours, perhaps? Great news, I thought. Just time for a quick game of Slitherlink before bed. I forced myself to turn the light and the DS off at midnight.
(* It would have a picture of E.T. on it, beside a picture of A.L.F., and on the back it would say “I am wearing a t-shirt which makes tangential reference to a comedy routine you wrote ten years ago, you embittered alcoholic blasphemer.” I don’t know whether Stewart Lee would be amused or offended. I suspect he would smirk in a manner which would make me feel small. Fortunately, the smirk would probably come while my back was turned, since that’s where the text would be.)