nude highway driving

Greetings from behind the electronic billboard in Shibuya. I’m sitting above the “famous” Starbucks in the little cafe (called Wired) inside Tsutaya where I ended up after the Stooges show last night. Enjoying a kahlua and milk while listening to Japanese conversation all around me and hearing wild cell-phone sounds as everyone tries to stay hyper-connected. Tummy’s full of killer yakitori and my mind is slowly erasing the day of editing as jazz replaces stress.

Getting an hour on one of these laptops for the price of a drink is much better than sitting in my room, uncomfortable on the bed because the desk is nowhere near a phone jack, typing on the borrowed work laptop while listening to the heat kick on.

I actually don’t have anything to say; I’m just a dork and think it’s way cool to be sitting here typing behind a giant-ass electronic billboard being watched by thousands as they prepare for the mad-ass dash across one of the busiest intersections in the world.

I think I’m going to try to start feeling my way through Life because thinking so much just doesn’t seem to work for me.

“Iggy! Iggy! Iggy!”

Forget what I said in the last post about wanting to steal the blood of my South American friends in order to somehow get more energy into my system. I can do better. I must kidnap Iggy Pop.

Tonight (technically last night) I had the honor, the privilege, the radical amazement of seeing Iggy & The Stooges reunited onstage at Shibuya-AX. I was braced for painful scalp prices for the show, as everything I read said it was sold out. Couldn’t find any scalpers so I walked up to a window and some little Shibuya-AX dude was selling tickets. Regular, face-value tickets (7,000 yen — about $70). Either the reports were bullshit or they opened up several tickets the night of the show, cause he had plenty. Ran into a shaggy-haired guy a bit older than me in a Cramps shirt and leather jacket who was losing his mind. “I can’t believe we’re about to see the fucking Stooges!” he kept yelling. Amen, brother.

(Note: Yes, $70 seems steep, but that’s Tokyo. Plus, I got to see Iggy & The Stooges in a place the size of D.C.’s 9:30 Club. Worth. Every. Yen.)

I’ve never seen Iggy Pop in concert before, and it definitely makes me feel old. If you took away a 10-year-old ADD patient’s Ritalin and substituted it with crack you’re still not quite approaching Iggy’s energy. He sprinted onto the stage in just a pair of jeans and boots while gyrating like Mr. Peepers. He’s constantly flopping around, yelling and pumping his fists, swaying side to side and destroying microphone stands (I think he killed about six in the course of the concert). He attacked a speaker and had sex with it, then attacked his guitarist and humped him, too. I can’t remember how many times he jumped onto the crowd.

The Shibuya-AX crowd wasn’t as apeshit as a crowd in the States would have been (well, anywhere in the States except D.C.), but they definitely made up for the overly-polite-to-the-point-of-yawning crowd at the David Bowie show. There was a mad pit going on (more like a giant pogo-fest than a sloppy thrash hole) and people all around were jumping up and down losing their minds. Girls in the balcony were screaming and Iggy kept smiling and waving, assuring everyone “We love you. We’re going to fuck you.” At one point Iggy invited everyone up onstage, then jumped into the middle of the mass and started a pit in front of the drummer.

Iggy, the Ashetons and Mike Watt (Raaar!) played tracks from every Stooges album, including “Dirt,” “1969,” “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (twice … not sure why but both times ruled), “TV Eye,” “No Fun” and “Real Cool Time.” No “Raw Power” or “Search and Destroy,” to my disappointment, but no worries. The new stuff, especially “Little Electric Chair,” was out of control.

The show made the cold-ass, rainy day vanish from my memory. It was one of those nights, like the Bowie night, where the day was kinda blah and I decided to take a chance and go to the show and everything sort of fell together in a most wonderful way. I capped off the night at a little Internet cafe on the top floor of a book/music/movie store in Shibuya, literally sitting behind one of the jumbo TVs you can see from the intersection. (It’s the one right above the Starbucks in “Lost in Translation.”)

I never dreamed I would get a chance to see Iggy & The Stooges live, and the show lived up to everything I imagined. Now if I can just figure out how to kidnap Iggy Pop and steal some of his blood, I’ll be set.

Q: What’s the best way to feel like an uptight white guy in Tokyo?

A: Attend the Ph.D. graduation party of your Venezuelan dentist friend, where 80% of the partygoers are from some Latin-American country … and try to dance with them when they start playing insane-ass Hispanic music.

I tried and tried to explain to them that North American males have some defect in their genes that prevents their hips from moving freely. I think there’s an operation that fixes that, but you have to get it done before you’re 10 or something. They didn’t offer this operation on the rough streets of JoMo in the 70s.

The worst part is there were two Lithuanians at the party — a tall-ass guy and a tiny little girl — who had more groove going on than I. Ouch. I don’t know how you get from polka to soul, but apparently you can. I remember doing really well in African Dance class in college. Not sure what happened. Maybe the teacher just told me I was doing well cause he liked my ass.

Anyway, I did have a fun time trying to get down at one of Tokyo’s international-student dorms. These things are a pretty cool setup — if you’re a foreign student attending one of the colleges or universities in Tokyo, you can live at one of these dorms. They are not connected to any school, so you are living with people from all over the world studying all kinds of different subjects at all kinds of different institutions. Besides meeting my first Lithuanians, I learned about Sri Lanka from a Singhalese dude and learned from an Indonesian dentist chick that Julio Iglesias charges too much when he plays Jakarta.

Because of my Venezuelan friend, I’ve met more dentists on this trip than I’ve known in my life. Most of them put their practices on hold or gave them up to come to Japan and get Ph.D.s in some sort of dental research. Apparently Japanese dental practice leaves much to be desired, but there is tons of cash here waiting to be dumped into research projects. When foreign students in any subject first arrive, they take nothing but immersion Japanese class eight hours a day for three months.

The Latin barbecue broke up and around midnight some of us headed to my neighborhood to hit a hip little dance club called Muse. It’s a damn nice club (I was put off by the 1,ooo-yen cover charge until I was handed a free-drink ticket) with well-separated spaces for lounging and dancing. It’s hidden next to an ice-cream shop and I’d never seen it. The DJ was amazing and the drinks were decent. I immediately understood what one of my South American friends meant when he said “The people at the club, they think they should be looked at.” Definitely high levels of gaijin conceitedness emanating from the rooms.

The attitude when we arrived at the club was “Well, the trains stop at midnight and don’t start until 5:30 — guess we’re out dancing for the night!” Muse is a quick walk from where I’m staying but I couldn’t bring myself to head home and wuss out. I had to stick it out.

After a while the dance floor got too crowded with drunk Americans who have less coordination than even I and our group was ready to hit a new spot. Unfortunately, we had lost the tall-ass (and by now very drunk) Lithuanian. He’s not hard to miss. After sweeps of the club and a few phone calls, he finally answered his cell and announced he was in Roppongi at Wall Street.

Ugh. Wall Street. Bad DJ, dance floor so crowded most of your drink usually ends up on the floor and a bar staff that weaves in and out like buzzards looking at everyone’s hands to make sure you have your required drink at all times. Thank God the tall-ass Lithuanian was easy to spot. Damn him for wanting to stay.

I finally walked out of the club into 5:30 a.m. sunlight as Roppongi began shutting down. The streets were filled with club zombies who were starting to disintegrate in the sun and massgee girls lined up in front of their respective establishments, looking like a ship’s crew saying goodbye as you disembark from your chaos cruise. We grabbed life-saving chicken kabob sandwiches and then I said goodbye to the dentists … who had a 3 p.m. department party to rest for.

Although I had effectively been celebrating for about 13 hours, I didn’t feel like I had just pulled an all-nighter. Maybe because I didn’t drink that much or because everyone in my group was hyper as hell (embrace osmosis). I think I’m going to kidnap one of my Latin-American friends here and force a blood transfusion in the hopes that maybe I can attain even half the energy.