Oddly,
the end of a late night in Tokyo after a spirited dinner, debriefing all the
day’s meetings and all the week’s progression, and drinks in a crowded, dimly
lit watering hole, often involves a move on to the making of loud music. My step son knows a place or two in Shibuya,
there must be over a hundred across the city, where you can rent a room for two
hours. Inside there is pristine
equipment, Marshall amps, lovely Fender Stratocasters, mics, a trap set. We head in there, press “record” on our iPhones and get very
loud.
Playing one of those amps loud, you are no longer solely
concerned about the actual music
you are playing. At that volume,
you have introduced a physical texture to music. Suddenly the feedback becomes something you can dance with,
moving in closer or further away from the amp. Kneeling down in front of the amp, supplicant, waves of
sound can nearly blow back your hair. A blues bend can last for rich, full seconds
in the air, throbbing; sounding so much closer to the sound your heroes were
able to summon. Distorted bar
chords cut the air like a two handed saw, with rusty teeth in dry, dead
wood. Therapeutic blood letting of
all the week’s tensions and frenzied marching.
And now it is very late. Shibuya doesn’t care.
It would appear that there backbenches full of replacement youth, who
are ready to start their evening's around this time. And it is certainly not too late to perform the capstone
gesture on an evening of private rock glory, the final bowl of ramen. We piled in to a place that, for the
same one-thousand yen I’d spent the day before yesterday in Harajuku, at a
place famous for Kyushu ramen, I received veritable washbasin full of noodles
and fatty pork. Often Japanese
meals are renowned on presentation and modest on portions. These guys didn’t get the memo. This vat is comical. Appropriately it draws laughter from
the people I’m with. I enjoy it
for a while, before I give up.
And now it is very, very late. I have an early flight. I laid all my things out the night before. Insurance policy, get the front desk to
call you just in case. But I know
that if I lie down, my body will wake me when I want it too. If I’m in a meeting and my body wants
to sleep, I may not be able to stop it, but this waking up, isn’t my particular
issue.
And now it is very, very early. Once again 笨鸟先飞[1] Standing
on the Keikyo Line train out to Haneda, accommodating the proximity of
everyone. Those girls have luggage, so does that guy, I keep telling
myself. This is definitely heading
to Haneda. I can see on the
monitors as we pull in to stations that this is an “Express Train” but damn if
we don’t seem to pull up at every single station we pass through on our way out
this morning. There is going to be
a lot of standing, till I get to the lounge. I stand on the escalator and in check in and then, I am
standing behind a thin, antsy guy in a grey suit whom I can only guess is from
the U.K., in the interminable security line. Did I mention I’m tired? Now it is immigration and they remove the staples with the
staple removing device they have at the ready from the departure form they
fastened in, when I arrived and I am out, officially, from Japan.
The ANA lounge is packed as I walk in. All the comfy chairs,
the ones I have been meditating on collapsing into for the last ninety
minutes, are occupied. Let’s settle matters in
the bathroom first. BANG. Can you say “aromatherapy?” Assaulted
by JASMINE or some such fragrance as I enter the men’s room. It’s almost enough
to make you miss the foul, human odors of a plumbing-less public facility in a
Dongcheng hutong. Off at the other end I find my
fantasy seat with no one next to me and lay my bag down. Grapefruit juice, curry noodles, some
kind of chicken salad, its not a bad free spread. Some gents are filling beers and pouring wine. It’s 7:45 in the morning and I manage
to convince myself that that this would be egregiously insipid.
The China Daily account of Chuck Hagel’s visit manages to
make the Chinese position seem inevitable, measured, sensible in much the same
way that the NY Times account I added two days back had the U.S. cast as an
exasperated parent counselling two pouty teens: http://africa.chinadaily.com.cn/weekly/2014-04/11/content_17426547.htm
I read the skin-colored Financial Times when they tell us to power off
devices. The tech sector is taking
a wallop. I certainly hope that is
temporal. Estonia is worried it might be next, despite NATO assurances and the CIA is under pressure, but not yet under torturous pressure, to release their secret report illustrating precisely what brutal torture methods they employed in the pursuit of national security.
I’d love to provide you all links to all these wonderful
stories but the FT requires you to be a member to see them on line and I can’t
be bothered. The ANA flight once again, is vacant. I have more room than I could ever need. I hope the Air China flight that leaves
a bit later is packed. In
isolation this is a rather sad metaphor for Sino-Japanese relations. No one is bothering to make the
journey.
And, much as I would like to write that we landed on a clear
blue sky, like the one we took off from in Tokyo, we are descending now into a
ochre, vacuum cleaner bag-like compromise. Everyone seems to notice. Once, twice and again I look. I can’t see the ground. Finally the wheels touch the tarmac and I consider the
limits of visibility outside.
Walking swiftly to the immigration line, I discover my
phone’s been shut by my chums at China Mobile Communications Corporation. I must have wracked up a bill in Japan.
No worries. I’ll use the free
airport wifi to call home. But
they want to send a password to me via SMS. Catch-22. I’ll
be cabing it home this morning.
In my ears I’ve throw on for the magic “second listening” of
something new. If you are
encountering something exceptional and new, one is often still digesting and
categorizing on the first listening.
This, (you’ll recall my wildly avant
garde insight a few posts back of actually synching music to my phone from
Rdio). I have on Prefuse 73
(a.k.a. Guillermo Scott Herren)’s 2003 release “One Word Extinguisher” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Herren
On first listening I didn’t know where to place it or if the
rhyming that was flying by was worthy.
This time I’m impressed by the caliber of delivery, dazzled by the
richness of the mix and so off-put by the distance of the journey involved that
I keep looking back at my phone to make sure we haven’t moved on to some other
artist.
Later at home, with my girls, I play "Busy Signal (Make
You Go Bombing Mix)" which made me laugh in the airport men’s room. It makes them laugh too.
[1] bènniǎoxiānfēi: lit. the clumsy bird flies early
(idiom); fig. to work hard to compensate for one's limited abilities
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