COMFORTABLY NUMBER

The 69 Love Songs entry in the 33 1/3 canon is too clever by 1/2...

CASH FROM CHAOS

(Turns out that Tubthumping had been used already as a theme song for FIFA 98. I have got to get out more.)

One day in the advertising office, early 2010…

Boss: OK, we need to come up with a campaign for FIFA 2011. Music ideas? Yes, Jenkins.

Jenkins: How about Tubthumping?

Boss: Tubthumping?

Jenkins: Yeah, you know (thumping his tub): “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down. I get…”

Boss: (Interrupting) I know the GD song, Jenkins. Particularly since it was used as a theme for FIFA 98. No, what we need is something equally as mindlessly Anglo and rousing, but obscure enough that music bloggers can feel self-satisfied as they point out that they recognize the song. Perhaps these bloggers will even embed videos of the group miming the song on some old show, like, I don’t know, Top of the Pops.

Jenkins: Top of the Whuh?

Boss: You're dead weight, Jenkins. Clean out your cubby.

Jones: I’ve got it, boss! How about Swords of a Thousand Men by Tenpole Tudor? It’s sort of like Skids if Skids weren’t Scottish. The singer Eddie Tenpole was once pegged as the replacement for Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols. He sang The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle.

Boss: Jones, you're a genius! Cocaine for everyone, on me!

HOPE IN OUR ENGLISH HEARTS

So the ad wizards behind the new FIFA 2011 video game went a little left field (uh, left pitch?) and used Swords of a Thousand Men by Tenpole Tudor in their campaign.

Bravo, says I. This is infinitely preferable to, say, Tubthumping, which was probably Monday's choice.

I'm still not buying the game. Or soccer, for that matter. Sorry, Rest of World...

THE RENTALS

A Japanese business model that never made its bones in America is CD rental.

Many of the large media stores in Japan offer this service, and have for at least the last 20 years or so.

It costs about $2 a pop to rent a disc for a day. When we were there, I grabbed 5 of the Beatles remasters that I had not bought, ripped them losslessly, and returned them the next day.

The selection of Western music skewed pretty heavily to classic rock, with some occasional veins of weirdness, but it's a good way to round out your catalog a bit.

MUSIC HAS THE RIGHT TO CHILDREN

It struck me on Sunday that listening to music has been a solitary pursuit for many years.

Once upon a time it was different. We sprawled out on the ring of a sump on summer nights and blasted My Eyes Have Seen You. We sat in Mike’s bedroom and listened to the Stones, trying to make out the words. We “borrowed” Howie’s mom’s old Peugot and hung out in the high school parking lot at dawn, dancing to Generation X.

Then slowly but surely, our lives became more compartmentalized, separate, private. Growing up, I think they call it.

I became more and more accustomed to listening to music through headphones or alone on half-hour commutes.

Having kids presented an opportunity to commune with new ears, and Lana in particular has developed a temporary passion for things like Deerhoof and The Go Team. But in general, my kids latch on to Taeko’s J-Pop with greater enthusiasm.

And that’s what we usually listen to when we’re out together on the weekends. But on Sunday, we were using my car. I put on Magical Mystery Tour, figuring you can easily form a consensus around the Beatles.

During one quiet moment, I Am the Walrus came on. The moment remained quiet throughout the song, and in this context I really heard it for the first time in decades.

Because we hear music better when we are together…

DESIGNED TO BLOW OUR MINDS

I took a six-month subscription to Rolling Stone for $1. Here are a couple of Arcade Fire facts I learned therein recently:

-Their latest album, The Suburbs, is their finest album to date.
-Their best song is No Cars Go. Because, you know, they released it on two different albums. So it must be good.

I'm enjoying my subscription immensely. It's like a bi-weekly ticket to Bizarro World...

TUESDAY'S OFFERING

Seemingly out of nowhere, Broadcast released an EP last month.

It's called (deep breath, now) Broadcast & The Focus Group, Study Series 4, "Familiar Shapes & Noises."

And it's more of the same psych Broadcast + library records stuff that they released on the last mini album (deep breath number two) Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age.

They're so inscrutable that it tickles...

LOSING MY EDGE

I’ve been very lethargic recently when it comes to new music, more so than usual.

A certain languor is part of my MO: I’ll listen to something a couple of times, find a reason to dismiss it, and then circle back later, sometimes to develop an obsession (say, Ships by Danielson), sometimes just to confirm my initial impression (say, Veckatimest).

I’m in this cycle now with Janelle Monae (“Waahh,” says I, “It’s toooo looonnng and schizo”), Arcade Fire (*cough* one-trick pony *cough*), and I fear I’m about to enter the cycle with False Priest (libido + logorrhea = libidorrhea).

But I’m troubled by the fact that I still have not even listened to the most-recent LCD Soundsystem. It’s sitting there on my iPod just taunting me…

CONTROLLER SPHERE

I bought False Priest on the cheap from Amazon yesterday.

So far, the last 1:30 of Our Riotous Defects has been worth the $2.99.

Probably not a great sign that this makes two OM albums in a row where I've been grabbed more by soundscapes than by songs...

WAIT AND SEE THE LIST OF SHIT YOU MADE

Of all the new release-y goodness on tap for fall/winter, I think I'm most looking forward to the new No Age.

I mean, I have a pretty good idea of what a 2010 Belle and Sebastian album will do for me.

I've listened to a bit of the NPR stream of the new Of Montreal, and I expect it will be more lamping than hissing.

And we are down to the last wispy contrails of Stereolab at this point...

But I don't know quite what to expect from No Age, which is one of their essential strengths...

AGAIN, I SWORE OFF CANADA

My friend He Knew He Was Right (HKHWR, as the kids call him) has been in the blogging business now for six months.

He writes primarily about family, horticulture, music, travel, sports. And don't be scared off by the moniker-- he's not a Glenn Beck or a Rush Limbaugh. It's just the title of a Trollope novel that neither you nor I have ever read...

In my 'umble opinion, this is his most affecting post to date. His conflation of the trials and tribulations of landscaping and his efforts to fill out his family tree have particular resonance for me, what with my black thumb and meager family line.

The piece is what I consider the best of HKHWR-- it is eloquent, elegant, and teaches me about things I know and do not know.

I thank him for it, and look forward to more.

Happy Anniversary!

BITTERSWEET SYMPHONY

My box of Japanese snacks is getting light.

I had budgeted $100 to buy snacks for the office, and another $150 for myself. The last traces of the office snacks (cheese and almond Doritos, ramune corn puffs) were gone by the start of the second week of my return.

My box is now down to some gum and watermelon hard candy. (I do have two bags of taco Doritos that I bought at the Costco in Chiba— I just need to reconfirm that they’re veg friendly.)

But all of my chocolates and my various vending-machine drinks are gone.

I expect that I’ll restock a bit up at Mitsuwa in November, but it just won’t be the same…

ICE ICE BABY

At the end of our street in Shibuya there was a kakigori stand. It was an elegant little box of a building, with dark wood paneling and a tropical feel.

Kakigori is a typical summer treat in Japan— ice is shaved from a block, and then covered in sweet syrups. Basically, it is the diamond to a Sno Cone's quartz...

We did not find the right time to stop and have a taste until the afternoon of our last day in town. It was 3:00 pm— lunch was enough of a memory and dinner sufficiently far off, and the temperature was skimming 100 degrees.

So we paused under one of the umbrellas in front of the stand and looked over the pictures of all the flavors. Grape, melon, sweet red bean, lemon, strawberry— it was quite a list.

Our choices made, we went around to the window and placed our orders with the lone man inside. He first filled a bowl halfway with ice, and then swirled a cloudy syrup of condensed milk over the top. The kids had ordered caramel, so that was the next syrup flavor to be drizzled over the ice.

He then added a second layer of ice, until a Fuji-esque mound teetered in the bowl. Another dressing of milk and caramel syrups, and he was done. He handed it through the window to Lana and Sebastian, who quickly found a table for two and began deconstructing it with their spoons.

I ordered a ramune-flavored ice— ramune is essentially lemon-lime soda, but with a longer finish than Sprite or 7-Up. I assumed there was no way I'd be able to polish it off, but 10 minutes later I was staring at an empty bowl, scraping the bottom with my spoon in vain...

YOU SET THE SCENE

Shibuya was a scene, once upon a time.

The Shibuya-kei sound was made popular back in the early 90s by artists like Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, and Fantastic Plastic Machine. It was frothy, electronic, and fun.

The scene may be gone, but our weekly mansion was surrounded still by music stores big and small. If I were a gear head, I’m sure I would’ve been in heaven— as it stands, I was satisfied enough to take a picture in front of one particularly impressive guitar shop.

There were also a number of recording studios up and down our street. Every day we’d walk past the kids loading in or loading out, sucking down CC Lemons and smoking Mild Sevens, and I’d wonder what kind of noise they were making inside.

And every day we just kept on walking…

I WISH YOU COULD SWIM LIKE THE DOLPHINS CAN SWIM

The Shinagawa Prince Hotel has among its amenities a small aquarium and a couple of aqua stadiums. The hotel is right across the street from Shinagawa Station, where we met some old friends from our New York days.

After lunch at the Dean & Deluca in the station, we all walked over to the aquarium. It had the slightly musty feel of a 90s tourist attraction, which registered to me as charm. One of the main features was a glass tunnel that intersected the primary tank—we were lucky enough to be there for feeding time:



There was a 2:30 dolphin show in the main aqua stadium, and Lana, Sebastian, and I staked out our front-row splash-zone seats 30 minutes before it started. I bought two ponchos, in an effort to stay dry from top to bottom. Well, I flinched instinctively with the first impending splash, and tore the poncho covering my pants. I yelled too, ensuring myself a nice lingering taste of dolphin water.

I sat in wet pants through the seal show at the smaller aqua stadium, but I was dry by the time we hit the gift shop. And although I chewed a few pieces of Fits gum on the train ride home, I still tasted the briny salt all the way back to Shibuya.

I didn’t care a bit…

ART LOVER

I first heard about the Bridgestone Museum back in college.

I was an English major, but a brief half semester with an alcoholic “Bible as Literature” professor once had me considering a switch to Art History. I dropped the class instead, and stayed the course.

So I put the Bridgestone on our itinerary for this trip, and in doing some research I discovered just how deep are the treads of my own ignorance: I never realized that Bridgestone Tire is a Japanese company. The founder’s name was Ishibashi, or “stone bridge”…

It’s a relatively small museum, located in the Bridgestone headquarters, amongst an accumulation of nondescript concrete midrises. We went on a quiet weekday morning, but word is that the foot traffic in the museum is rarely heavy.

The general focus of the collection is on Impressionism/Post-Impressionism, and many of the key players are represented by two or three paintings. The lack of a crowd allows for a leisurely pace—Lana told me somewhat breathlessly that I had spent 117 seconds looking at a Renoir. Which in 11-year-old art-museum time is like 3 hours…

The kids were eager to move on to the Pokemon Center, so we only clocked about an hour and a half total in the museum, but it was a morning well spent.

MANSION ON THE HILL

In Shibuya we stayed six days in what the Japanese call a “weekly mansion.”

You and I would call it a one-bedroom apartment, but I submit that we'd suffer in the comparison.

Our place was on the 5th floor, and a small elevator with about a 600 lb capacity groaned as it shuttled us up and down.

The apartment itself-- excuse me, mansion-- was comfortable and sleek. There was a single full-size bed, and an appointment of futons for us to lay out on the floor each night. A 37” LCD was in the corner of the living room, and at the other end was a two-person leatherette couch.

The kitchen held a refrigerator the size of the kids, a range, a grill, and a microwave. The WC had a toilet with more buttons than I'm accustomed to seeing on a toilet-- the pictures made it pretty clear what the buttons did, but I was sufficiently happy just to flush.

Not to harp on toilets too much, but it is a common feature of Japanese toilets to have a small faucet on top of the tank that runs every time you flush. This is mainly because the WC is separate from the washroom.

Our washroom contained a small dual-use washer/dryer, and we put it through its paces every sweaty day.

Adjacent to the washroom was the shower room. I love Japanese shower rooms almost beyond reason. First, there is a deep tub for soaking; then, the remainder of the room is essentially a large shower. No concerns here about splashing water on the floor, and not a hint of claustrophobia.

My only disappointment was that Taeko and I could not steal the time to take a bath together...

WORKING FOR PEANUTS IS ALL VERY FINE

Yachimata in Chiba prefecture is proud of its peanuts.

One morning on the way to take the kids to see the latest Pokemon movie, our gracious hosts stopped at a roadside peanut farm/gift shop.

We milled about for a little while, and soon noticed that a table at the front of the shop was starting to fill up with small, clear cups of peanuts.

In all, about a dozen varieties were brought out, followed by peaked wedges of iced watermelon and cups of cold, simple tea. We were encouraged to sit down and sample.

There were nuts enrobed in white cheese, nuts drenched in dark chocolate, and nuts dusted with a mild, tangy chili powder (my favorite). We tried them all, and leveled our watermelons, and drained our cups of tea.

It didn't cost us a thing, and it might have been my favorite eating experience of the entire trip...

GHIBLI

The Ghibli Museum was several stations from Shibuya, in Mitaka.

At Mitaka Station, we waited for a bus to take us to the museum. I hoped against hope that it would be a catbus, but it was not quite.













The line in front of the museum snaked in an orderly fashion, and was propelled forward by my constant prayers to escape the heat. After 15 minutes or so, we crossed the threshold and produced our advanced tickets—this got us both admission and tickets to a museum-only short film.

The film tickets were themselves made up of three cels from various Miyazaki movies. Lana and Sebastian got Spirited Away, and Taeko got Ponyo. No one could quite fix the source of mine—it was three nearly identical scenes of Miyazaki greenery.

The film we were going to see was called Mei and the Kittenbus, which is a 12-minute extension of Totoro.

But first we went up to the top floor so that the kids could spend some time on the catbus. Any potential self-consciousness about playing on a giant stuffed animal melted away pretty quickly. Lana crept inside the bus and stuck her head out the window, cooled by an imaginary wind. Sebastian leapt from the roof of the bus, not trying to fly, but flying.

We then walked outside, where a spiral staircase surrounded by a wrought-iron turret brought us to the roof of the museum. There was a small arbor there, where we met this fellow:













It was hot on his watch, but he didn’t seem to care. I stood sentry with him for a bit, gave him a little bow, and then headed back to the air conditioning.

We rushed down to catch the next viewing of Mei and the Kittenbus—the ushers told us we’d need to sit on the steps, but we found some empty bench space there in the Saturn Theater.

The movie was adorable—Sebastian next to me stomped his feet gleefully several times, and talked about it for days after. I was very happy just to spend more time in that world.

We toured the rest of the museum. There were many nice displays that spoke to the sheer mechanical effort of traditional animation. The final thing we looked at was truly amazing—a large wheel filled with figurines from Totoro in slightly different poses. The wheel spun quickly under a strobe light, and the figurines themselves became animated. I was dumbstruck. I want one.

The gift shop was sizable, and contained many items that were not available in the Tokyo toy stores. Sebastian got a pewter Nausicaa robot and Lana got a stuffed Teto; I picked up a t-shirt.

We took the bus back into town for lunch at Pancake Days. I ate a small stack of three fluffy pancakes with a perfect round scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side.

And days don’t come much better than that…

E(-)M(A)I(L) UNLIMITED EDITION

The price I paid for two and a half weeks out of the office was 1,847 e-mails. Took the better part of a day to clean them up.

But for damn sure it was worth it...