nude highway driving

I remember the first time I saw it happen in public — I was hanging out one fine day in Yoyogi Koen when I noticed a Japanese couple nearby. The girl was sitting, and her husband/boyfriend was laying down with his head in her lap. She was slightly bent over, gazing romantically at him, and I saw her arm moving in a gentle, rhythmic motion. Then I saw her lift her hand and wipe off the little stick she held.

She was cleaning his ears. I later learned all about mimikaki from an American friend who is addicted to his Japanese wife’s ability to dig wax out of his ears without pulling brain matter out in the process. It’s a Japan thing.

So I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me to see an article in The Japan Times recently about salons opening up that clean your ears (use BugMeNot if it locks out). What better way to cap off a day or work and night of drinking than to have someone jam a camera-enabled pick in your ear so you can watch your very own “house of wax” on TV? A thousand yen gets you a 10-minute ear-cleaning and a quick massage. Ten thousand yen gets you a deluxe ear cleaning and a “happy ending.” (Just kidding — though it would be a great way to drum up some business. Especially if you name the salon Love Canal.)

Sorry. Time for bed.

True to form, I didn’t take as many photos Sunday as I should have. I virtually forgot I had a camera once we were safe and warm in Hobgoblin and the Guinness was flowing freely as The Pogues made love to our ears. (Actually, the Guinness was flowing freely well before we got to any pub.)

You can find other parade photos here. Of course, the punk rock Japanese dude in a makeshift Great Kilt rockin’ the bagpipes was a highlight, as was the Japanese band performing “Hot Stuff.”

I almost forgot it’s about time for the south by southwest festivals in Austin. You know what that means? Mass quantities of music in a free download. The festival organizers last year offered almost 1,000 songs by participating bands in two torrents and it was a great chance to hear new music you otherwise wouldn’t notice. SXSW and CitizenPod are doing it again this year, also offering trailers for movies in the film festival.

All you need is BitTorrent and a high-speed Internet connection (or a low-speed connection with an assload of patience and quaaludes) to enjoy. The coding is fucked up on some of the songs, and like last year the add-ons in the second, smaller torrent aren’t labeled very well, but it’s still a wonderful opportunity that the RIAA doesn’t fully comprehend. (And it’s also a wonderful opportunity for me to appreciate Japan — I averaged a megabyte a second on the download, thanks to an apartment wired for fiber optic Internet. For about $18 a month I get a 100 Mbps connection. In D.C. I paid Verizon twice that for a few hundred kbps.)

Thanks to Ronin for reminding me that it’s SXSW time and for steering me in the direction of Lesbians On Ecstasy, my new best friends. He described them perfectly: “They sound like ABBA rumbling with Ministry inside a women’s prison.”

I haven’t made it very far into my new collection, but already am discovering new shit I dig. Christopher O’Riley rocks the piano with a cover of “Paranoid Android.” I cracked up listening to the opening lyrics of Chris Mills’ “Chris Mills is Living the Dream.” And I was happy to see some Dresden Dolls, who I just started getting into thanks to Bagcast #2. I’m also really diggin’ the Gogol Bordello track.

Download the 2+ gigs of love or peek around the showcases pages to see if you find something groovy and new. If you can’t find anything original enough, take comfort in knowing we’ll always have kiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!

The weekend started out rough, with me starting to feel like I was about to go through some hot flu action toward the end of my 14-hour day at work Friday, but I started recovering a bit and made it out Saturday night. A friend was having sayonara party on the top floor of Roppongi Hills, and I definitely wanted to go. There’s a little cafe/bar on the 52nd floor, and as expected it has some kick-ass views of Tokyo (click No. 3 for my favorite angle).

I didn’t know if I’d know anyone else at this thing, but that’s usually the kind of situation that turns into great fun. And it did. It became the kind of evening that I came to Tokyo to experience — I met people from about eight or nine different countries at the party, even having a groovy political discussion with a woman from India and a guy from Egypt. There was exchanging of numbers and e-mails with several interesting people, and I may get some advice from a personal trainer on how fix the fact that I have 98% bodyfat.

It was a good night, but it didn’t end there. After the party broke up around 11:30 (scenic floor closing and all), I headed back to my ku in order to catch a DJ friend spin some drum n bass love at Club Ovo. There was even a special guest star from Malaysia, who was also damn good (and probably famous to people who know anything about drum n bass). Drunken Japanese dancing like mad. I made it to 2:30 before the smoke destroyed my will to live (the club is about as big as my apartment).

Besides, I couldn’t wait to step outside and enjoy the fun of no less than four taxi drivers using all their powers of concentration to pretend I don’t exist. This sometimes happens here — gaijin are seen as too much trouble by some drivers. We might have cooties or, worse, not speak Japanese very well. As one of my co-workers, who is black, said when he saw this happen to me in the daytime: “Now you know what we feel like.” Not quite, but it’s interesting to have a small taste.

On Sunday I cleaned my apartment … um, for the first time since moving in two months ago. Ahem. Yeah. My inspiration? A visit from my artistic buddy Geoffrey, heir to the James K. Polk legacy of power and enemy to all hippos and painters of light. We roamed the new hood, grabbing some Guinness Bitter (yum) and other fine beers at my local liquor store. Behind us was a guy pushing a stroller, and in the stroller was a little boy (maybe 2 or 3) holding a can of Guinness. He held it up for the man at the counter but couldn’t quite reach. He’s destined to be a great leader someday. I love Japan.

After much beer bonding in my tatami tea room, we headed for dinner at an Indian restaurant run by Sikhs. I’d been there before (stumbled upon it once), and the Indian woman at Saturday night’s party told me it was the best Indian food she’d had in Tokyo. I decided to be adventurous and try something new (to me) called “chilly lamb.”

Soon after ordering I learned a lesson I will never forget. When the man in the turban says “It’s quite hot,” what he really means is “This will burn straight through your throat into your soul and make stomach acid flee screaming from your body through your eyeballs to save itself from the pain.” I’ve had fire chicken with Tim in Seoul, and I’ve eaten many spiced-up foods in Thailand. Holy fuck I wanted to die. It turned into a two-naan, six-gallons-of-water meal, and I still couldn’t finish the curry (I tried; despite the pain it was good. So good it hurt. Just like a good dominatrix, except you’re not tied up and she keeps lighting white phosphorus in your mouth.)

The waiter took a break from laughing at me with the rest of the staff to come say “This is the hottest thing we have on the menu.” Thanks a lot for clarifying that now. Notice how that sentence is significantly different from “It’s quite hot,” the answer you gave me when I asked about it before ordering? Yes, that difference is important. I hope you’ll contribute to my new esophagus fund.

The best part? While Geoffrey’s in the bathroom I glance over at the table next to me, and catch the eyes of an Indian guy and his tiny little Japanese girlfriend. They smile and he says “So, you tried the chilly lamb, huh?” Yes, yes I did. “That’s what she had, too,” he adds as I glance at her empty bowl. God I’m a pussy.

My friend Diablo — with whom I used to share three-Guinness lunches to counteract extreme job frustration at a startup in Boulder and the painful sound of trustafarians who think they can drum — has been trying to push me back to the laptop to update this space. This space which I originally had planned to “write in every day!” Yikes. But he’s asking, so I’m writing.

Diablo found me about a year ago because of this site. I guess that’s one thing the Web is good for — finding old friends. Another friend I never, ever thought I’d see again found me by typing “bingo hand job” in Google. Life is cool.

I also use the Web to find old friends — some I know, some I’ve never met. You see, when I was a teenager I spent a lot of time in my room with “my friends” — posters, albums and cassette tapes of musicians I dug. I wasn’t a total recluse or anything, I just felt connected to the music and the people who made it. I felt closer to them than most of the people I saw each day. Every once in a while I wonder “whatever happened to …” and I start searching. Such musings were difficult to satiate before the Web. Now it’s not so hard.

One of my closest aural friends was a cassette tape called “The Decline of Western Civilization,” a soundtrack for the documentary of the L.A. punk scene circa 1979-1980. The thing blew me away — it was infinitely far from me both in time and space, but it was a big part of my teen life. I would have killed to go halfway across the country and back in time five years to be there. I still would. I never actually saw the movie until five years later in college, finding it at a rental shop. I still wish I had stolen that tape, as I didn’t see it again until two nights ago when I found via Bittorrent (thanks, Internet!).

I started snooping around, and I found out (I’m sure this is old-ass news to some friends) that there’s a movie coming out about The Germs! Even better, the three living members of the band are touring with the actor who plays Darby Crash because he did such a good job of playing the madman. The shows have had some good reviews, and it looks like they are pretty damn tight together. I’m fairly sure they won’t be coming to Tokyo (if they do, they have a place to crash — get it? I slay me), but I’ll probably seriously consider a trip to California should they keep the gigs going. (Sidenote: I had one of my first feelings of “These damn kids today, they don’t understand” in 1996 when I saw Foo Fighters at the Ogden Theatre in Denver. I’m surrounded by all these people saying “Oh my God, it’s the drummer from Nirvana!” and I’m thinking to myself “Oh my God — I can’t believe I’m finally seeing Pat Smear play live!”) I can remember driving around with a blue circle hanging in my 1977 Datsun. And I still believe the amazing power of The Germs is vastly underestimated. The guitar on “No God” alone is one of the baddest things you’ll ever hear — the perfect punk-rock riff. And I love the fact that Belinda Carlisle’s first musical experience was as their drummer.

After uncovering this I thought “What the fuck was the story on Alice Bag Band?” They have a song on the soundtrack and are in the movie, but I never really heard anything else about them growing up. Sure enough, they have a Wikipedia entry. This led me to Alice Bag’s homepage, which has a great scrapbook of the old L.A. punk scene. You’ll find some cool surprises in there. And she’s only gotten sexier with age. Damn. (shiver) She also writes an amazing blog (now with kick-ass podcasts!), and penned one of the greatest explanations of the fleetingness of time (in regards to “back in the day”). I’ve been thoroughly enjoying reading and listening to her, even if I know there’s probably very little chance she and Jane Wiedlin will show up in Japan and stomp on me.

I sorta know what happened to Black Flag, Circle Jerks and X (still mind-blowing live; I only hope I get to catch The Knitters), so I didn’t spend a lot of time on them the other night. I was curious about Fear, though. I liked their stuff as a kid, only to be disillusioned in 1994 when I saw them (actually Lee Ving with a bunch of new kids) in Lawrence, Kan., and realized he was just a stupid racist asshole. Still, I wanted to see the infamous performance on “Saturday Night Live” I’d been hearing about for 20 years … they supposedly induced chaos on the set and trashed their dressing room. Thanks to YouTube, you can see a piece of that 1981 madness.

The great thing, at least to me, about finding blogs of people you used to look up to and/or rock out to but at some point lost track of is that you see they are regular people. They may still be cool as hell — Alice Bag and Bob Mould are way cooler than I ever will be — but they are still just people. They cease to be posters or frozen-in-time concert moments of infinite youth — they become aging mortals who deal with all the same shit that we deal with. And I think it’s fascinating to see what they’re up to. (And I love the fact that I can easily find a site dedicated to my favorite record label, or find a gaggle of interviews with people with whom I’m actually interested in seeing interviews be conducted.)

It’s almost enough to make me forgive the Web for the dancing hamsters.