Kokoro
Monthly Archives: March 2000
Sobu Sun Darkening
Sobu Sun Darkening
The Parking Lot of Tokyo Disneyland
Spent the afternoon exploring the Urayasu and Kasai areas of Tokyo Bay, a lot of areas which are reclaimed land as I understand it, including the land where Tokyo Disneyland is. I took this footage here, and vaguely recalled some words on the Los Angeles Disneyland parking lot written by the French philosopher Baudrillard in the book Simulacra and Simulations (see quoted paragraph at the bottom of entry), where he compares Disneyland’s parking lot to a concentration camp. I wonder what Baudrillard would say about Tokyo Disneyland – but I think it connects to his idea (which I vaguely understand) that in this day and age things simulate things which are themselves simulations.
In my walks around Tokyo’s bay area, I constantly see these palm trees. They look so out of place in this March landscape, where trees have yet to blossom and the patches of grass are all brown. Palm trees outside of their natural habitat offend the eye so greatly – but on the other hand, I suppose lots of the trees we see here and there are not native either – but these other trees are not necessarily trying to signify anything – not that the palm trees themselves are actively signifying things – trees don’t study semiotics.
Here’s Baudrillard’s writing on the LA Disneyland parking lot:
“Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot – a veritable concentration camp – is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.”
Exile Songs
Recent purchases include the Triton sequencer/sampler/synthesizer from Korg, the Roland VS-880 EX virtual studio, and a CD burner. Meanwhile, a Sony Digital 8 video camera is still being paid off from Spring 1999. We’re waiting for the future to come along and sweep us away.?
This is the contents of the first CD mix I made on my Roland VS-880 hard-disc recorder that I’ve got connected to a CD-R:
1. Junior Byles & Lee Perry – “Curly Locks” – a total dub reggae classic that somehow doesn’t wear itself when you play it on repeat for hours at a time. “Two roads before you, which one will be your choice?”
2. Bows – “King Deluxe” – a lush track by one of my favorite new groups. A project from Luke Sutherland formerly of Long Fin Killie. His sweet and strange juxtapositions of sound continue.
3. Spring Heel Jack “My Favourite Things” – a Rodgers & Hammerstein cover from their recent Sound of Music EP.
4. Joe Hisaishi “Silent Love” – a nice piano number from the Takeshi Kitano soundtrack composer.
5. Allen Toussaint – “Southern Nights” – freaky piano styling and atmospherics from the soul legend.
6. Tim Buckley “Love From Room 109 At the Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway)” – this is so far out there.
7. U2 – “If God Will Send His Angels” – Am I the only one in the world that thinks U2′s Pop is a good album?
8. Keith Hudson – “Black Right” – an ocean of drums and sweet guitar licks from Hudson뭩 Blood & Fire classic, Pick A Dub
9. Billie Holiday – “I’m A Fool To Want You” – this version is one of the extra cuts from the CD reissue of Lady In Satin, her last proper album. The voice is the ultimate analogue instrument. Living things change. They never remain the same.
10. George Delerue – “Camille” from the soundtrack to Jean Luc Godard’s “Le Mepris” – living in Tokyo, haunted by the last train, a compilation of New Wave soundtrack music has been indispensable.
11. Ike & Tina Turner – “Every Day I Have To Cry” – recorded in the last days of Phil Spector.
12. Massive Attack – “Teardrop” – stunning collaboration with Liz Frazer of the Cocteau Twins. I considered putting the Mad Professor remix here, but stuck with the original.
13. Joe Hisaishi – “Sonatine” – from the wicked soundtrack to the wicked Takeshi Kitano movie.
14. Speed – “Long Way Home” from the Japanese super pop idol group. Four teenage girls whose faces can be seen everywhere. One of these pop songs that is played so much, you can feel it in the air.
15. Bob Marley/Bill Laswell “No Woman No Cry” – in 1998, Laswell got access to the Marley master tapes, and did ambient remixes of about 12 tracks. Last year, modern hip-hop and R&B artists went one step further, doing hi-tech duets with Marley, including the stunning version of “Turn The Lights Down Low” with Lauryn Hill
Akira Kurosawa Exhibition
Timed with the recent release of “Ame Agaru” (it was finished by the assistant director) the movie Kurosawa was working on when he died in 1998, there was a recent Tokyo exhibition of Kurosawa memorabilia. A bizarre collection and juxtaposition of items could be found in the large gallery space. In one glass case, Kurosawa’s San Francisco 49ers winter coat was hanging – across the space, letters of admiration from Stanley Kubrick, Maurice Jarre, and others could be found displayed. The exhibition, entirely in Japanese, walked the viewer through each of Kurosawa’s movies, displaying a vast amount of notebooks. Kurosawa appears to have filled multiple notebooks for each film, and judging by what I could see in the exhibition, his notebooks could fill countless boxes. On one opened page, I could see the red marks left by a rusted paper clip. Kurosawa said, “My own experiences and various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason I always keep a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me a point of breakthrough.”
For about $300, you could buy an absolutely massive and beautiful red book that included the complete Kurosawa paintings, done in preparation for different scenes from his movies. On display were several intricately designed costumes – they looked like nothing from the 20th Century, and regarding them I felt as if I was in a museum of Japanese History gallery. Kurosawa said, “I am often accused of being too exacting with sets and props, and of having props made that will never appear on camera just for the sake of authenticity. But even if I don’t ask for this, my crew do things for me in this way.”