More Stupidity

Last weekend I met up with some of the usual suspects out here in OHGACK! Good conversation, good tunes, and good folks. The only problem was that I was supposed to meet my friend Reiko early the next morning to hang out in Nagoya, and getting to sleep at 3 AM isn't exactly the best thing to do when that's your plan, but I was up at 8, in Nagoya by 10, and at Nagoya castle by noon. Nagoya castle's grounds are pretty cool, a super giant moat, lots of greenery, a nice park where we witnessed a bunch of creepy dudes following a girl around who would stop and pose periodically at different scenic locations... but I'm off on a tangent now. I guess what I was trying to get at was that, even though I enjoyed visiting the castle, it's more of a museum to the old castle than it is a living monument. The inside has way too many visible modern conveniences and an elevator, so I was a bit disappointed. Regardless, though, it was good times.

We headed out to Osu next to meet up with the usual Nagoya suspects for lunch. Reiko wanted to eat specialties specific to Nagoya, so we had miso-katsu, and later on we had tebasaki (super salty chicken wings) and IT WAS GOOD! (imagine the Rock reading Genesis so you can get what I was going for there) Reiko ended up coming back to OHGACK where we met up with the same usual suspects and chatted for a bit and watched a Pteradon video, as well as video from the super awesome 38-band punk festival I went to in Tokyo last week (you're gonna have to wait to read about that one!).

The next day, Reiko had to catch the bullet train back home to meet up with her boyfriend, whose birthday it was, so we stopped off at my favorite Brazilian place for lunch. AND IT WAS GOOD! By chance, there were some pamphlets on the table for an art festival happening in town, but I didn't think much of it, even though I had heard a bit about a different music festival happening at the same time. On the way back to the station to drop off Reiko we happened upon this art gallery whose walls and floor were covered in scrawled gibberish, kind of like a horror movie set or something. It was tight. We also walked through an underground tunnel with rocks that moved on their own accord. N?

Reiko left and I decided to check out more of the festival, which actually ended up being pretty cool. There was a really cool book compiled featuring photos of signs from all over OHGACK, and a camera obscura bus thingy that you could ride inside of and see images from outside the bus projected onto a screen inside. If I ever figure out how to transfer photos from my cell phone to the computer, you may actually see some of the stuff someday, but for now this insufficient description must suffice.

My friend Josh's band was playing as part of the music festival that evening, but since it was raining, they moved the performance into this giant gym so the sound was pretty awful. I was impressed by Josh's skills though, so that was N. The band that performed before him was made up of a bunch of 16 year olds, one of whom was wearing a tuxedo vest, and another who was wearing a sweater-shawl combo thingy. They looked goofy, but they could all shred, so who am I to diss these 16 old prodigies???

Anyway, the next Tuesday a bunch of us went back to check out the art and music again, this time to see some OHGACK hip-hop. There was a giant dude in a Yankees jersey who kept on pronouncing Ogaki as OHGACK, doing his best American-thug impersonation. One of the other bands was this really sleazy, all-girl psychadelic band. Not sleazy in a racy sense, but more just that their music was super dirty and garagey sounding, it was actually alright.

I was pretty jazzed to see some art and culture in Ogaki, even though it was kind of disappointing to find that so few people knew about what was going on, and the events didn't seem too well attended.

Tonight I finally found the one club in Ogaki that hosts live music, and some of us are thinking about starting a band, so keep your eyes open for what may come...

Ah yes, yet another stupid post, hurried due to my rush to finish it before my tenuous internet connection stolen from my neighbor's wireless signal fades...

PEACE!

Life Is Forever

My new favorite TV show is this show called 青い瞳の聖ライフ, or Aoi Hitomi no Sei Raifu, or Blue Eyes' Pure Life (that's my wack translation anyway). It's this show about an American girl named Beth from New York who ends up in Japan somehow at a Japanese high school, and she falls in love with this dufus named Yuu, and her dream is to organize a rock festival at the school and marry Yuu. But, every episode, someone gets hella mad at Beth and they yell at her for being such an insensitive foreign/white/American bitch, even though Beth is unimaginably thoughtful and kind. Beth speaks perfect Japanese in the most ridiculously butchered American accent, and I'm not sure if she is purposely hamming it up, or if she really is incapable of bettering her accent. Heck, I get made fun of everyday by my students for speaking Japanese, and my accent isn't even a tenth as bad as Beth's is (but her Japanese skill absolutely destroys mine regardless). Did I mention that this show was made in 1984? I don't know why they're re-running it on TV here now, but it is the highlight of my cold, lonely, depressing, dreary evenings... *sigh* (I only pay $50 in rent, suckers!!!!)

I dug up as much info as I could on the show, so here's some more info and videos for all of you, who I'm sure are VERY INTERESTED, right???

Here's the opening theme:



Here's Florence Haga, the star of the show, [poorly] singing a cheesy pop song:



Here's some links too:
Screenshots and Info

Japanese Wikipedia Entry



What is wrong with me?

Yesterday...

...was one of those days. All those stereotypes that really annoy foreigners finally popped up all in one day, and more!!! I got a "You're good with chopsticks!" and another "Wow, you can write Japanese!" for the first time since I've been here, which actually didn't annoy me all that much. What really annoyed me was that on my way home some guy commented as I rode my bike by "Oh, a foreigner..." HELLO FOOL!!! There's thousands of foreigners all across this town!!! I even rode next to four spanish speaking women this morning on the train, not to mention all the Brazilians, Indians and whiteys I see every dang day. I'm not so annoyed about having been recognized as a foreigner (because I totally am!) but that it's such a big deal for this guy to comment about it out loud.

ALSO, to cap off the bummer that was yesterday, the rain starting pouring cats and dogs a few minutes before I left work, only to subside completely right about the time that I arrived at the station near my house. I tried to cheer myself by going to my favorite restaurant in town, Landy Shop III, but it was closed inexplicably. On the bright side, I went to Hard Off, the local junk electronics shop, and found out that they're opening a second location in town! WOOHOO!!! I saw the same guy there digging through old LPs that I talked to at another junk store across town. WHICH REMINDS ME that I think all you loyal readers should know about the Warren G record that I found for 100yen in said junk store amongst hundreds of Seiko Matsuda and Southern All Stars records.

This is probably the stupidest blog entry ever.

Otsukaresamadeshita

HELLO!!!
Loyal readers, here I am writing to you live from Ogaki, Japan. My town of 150,000 has a lot of shopping malls, a lot of "snacks" (places where you pay to go sing karaoke and drink with old ladies), and a lot of Brazilians!!! The Brazilians are the good part of that statement, because they make the best dang food in this town, and they also take the heat off of me, because I'm not the only foreign looking guy around.

I always think of stuff to write about while I'm walking around town, but I forget it once I sit down to actually type, so, thus, I will just recap my final weekend for you:

Friday night, I thought about going to the neighboring city of Gifu, so I hit up a few of my homies out there. I went to Gifu and found a little punk rock/hip-hop record store called Sabotage Records, where I bought a 3000yen BREAKfAST 7", then I finally heard back from a friend who invited me to go get sushi. I met up with her and 3 other girls, but we were soon joined by another dude. The sushi was super expensive, but super good!!!!!!! I went home around 10pm, and as I was exiting Ogaki station I ran into my next door neighbor and some other friends who were waiting for someone, and he exited 10 seconds behind me. I ended up hanging out with them until 4am!!!!

The next day we were supposed to go to some posh all-you-can-eat/drink place in Nagoya, but it was on the rooftop of some building and due to the heavy rain we'd been having it was cancelled. A small group of us went anyway, AND IT DIDN'T EVEN RAIN!!!! But, since it had already been cancelled, we just ended up meeting up with my friend Adam in Nagoya and went to this place called Misfits where he works. Apparently it was a bit of an off night for the place, and there was a total dufus playing bad covers on his guitar with drum machine accompaniment, but we all had a good time. After leaving Misfits, a couple of us wandered down to Sakae, the hub of activity in Nagoya, and there we went looking for a place to settle down. Whilst waiting, we decided to be all Rocky-core and down some raw eggs, which may or may not have been a great idea. Right after we had finished doing that, we witnessed an old drunkard grab some young dufus by the shirt and start pushing him around. It was a super tame fight, and when the cops pulled up to stop it, they actually just sat in their car watching for a good minute before getting out. They let the old guy walk off and gave the young guy a stern talking-to. NICE?

We ended up getting some kebabs from a cart on the street, except they were more like falafels (there was no stick). Apparently they call them kebabs in the UK when they're like that anyway, but I digress... Adam ended up meeting up with us again sometime around this point with a friend of his and we went to check out some place that his friend recommended. There were tons of young'uns hanging about, mostly Brazilian, and this one skater fool came up to us and asked us to "go smoke the hemp" with him. I borrowed his skateboard to try and ollie, but ended up bum rushing me from behind, took his skateboard and proceeded to go full speed into a wall. NICE?

This night progressed until we ended up at a ramen shop called Coco Ichiban, where they serve ramen on a spicy scale of 1-10. My Japanese coworkers say that 3 is hot enough, my American friend from Chicago said he could handle 7, but I went for the 10 of course, DUH!!!... What a horrible decision!!! I couldn't even finish it, and I felt pretty disgusting the rest of the night, which I ended up spending napping in a Denny's for about an hour. After that, it was about 6am, at which point I was able to catch the first train of the day back to Adam's house and sleep.

The next day Adam and I explored the town, and I found a rare 7" with the only Fruity song not included on their complete discography CD, and a copy of the first Alkaline Trio LP for super cheap. Ebay, here I come!!! We hit up some other cool places, had dinner with his in laws, and I went home and slept at a reasonable hour.

Good times...? YES!

Love,
B