Last night after work, I’d arranged to meet a few friends at the Tokyo blues carnival. When I left work, the sky was swelling like it might burst at any moment. I took the Subway three stations, and walked through long underground corridors, seeing no one at all. I went out the Hibiya Park exit, and experienced one of the coolest outdoor sonic experiences of my life. The park seemed to be me to my left, and to my right across the street were a bunch of office buildings, but the music distinctly sounded like it was coming from the right side. So, I crossed the street – when I got to the other side, it sounded like the music was coming from the left side – and so I crossed again, and again it sounded like the music was coming from the right sound. And then, I began to wonder if there were two bands. What with the bursting clouds and all, the distant drums sounded like the greatest thunder I’ve ever heard. Some kind of fantastic effect box the downtown office core of any big city could become, don’t you think?
In the end, I stuck with the left direction. I walked around the corner, and my three Japanese friends/students were emerging from a group of bushes, where they’d been watching the concert from the outside. We were planning on watching from the outside, because tickets were 6800 Yen (about $60 US). Crazy. What other country would spend this much on concerts? My friends had bought 4 tickets from scalpers, but they’d been ripped off. Two of the tickets were missing the bottom part attached by the perforated edge. And these scalped tickets cost 5000 Yen apiece. But whatever, with the last act of the night already in progress, we all got into the amphitheatre space.
Buddy Guy, the great blues guitarist, was playing. I knew him only by name before this. What a star this guy is – I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never been to a blues concert before, but this guy seemed like kind of a god, the way he controlled each note being sent forth into the night sky. Him and his band did a few impressions of other players, including a perfect few minutes of John Lee Hooker. The Japanese crowd, so politely kept out of the aisles, so we could run down, and get right in front of the stage. Then, the rain started to fall, and as if he was waiting for that moment, Guy dramatically let an extended moment of silence pass by, and then went into the most gorgeous soul song I’ve heard in my life crooning “It Feels Like Rain”, and lonely, sparse playing rippled out through the park. And the song went on, searing and burning up, and spasming at times, like cold water poured onto hot coals. And Guy went deep into the audience, still playing. And the rain fell harder. And I just thought to myself, how fucking cool, how fucking absolutely cool this is.
After the show, we took a taxi to an Ichigaya office building, driving along the old moat that surrounds the Imperial Palace in the central part of Tokyo. We drank beer, and my friends took turns playing the guitar, in this 12th floor office with this wicked anime-esque view of the city scene below. As a very late birthday gift, one of my friends gave me this CD, a Yazoo compilation of St. Louis blues from 1929-1933 – but the CD comes in the strangest packaging I’ve ever seen. Somehow, I forgot that CDs were once so wonderfully packaged. The CD is in this long box, the same height as a record – I took it for granted that record stores had to rearrange their shelf space when CDs first came out. I don’t want to break the cellophane wrap, because this strange elongated rectangular box appears to me like some distant medium unrealized, containing some wonderful mystery.
Maybe CDs are better left in their package. The problem with music today is that it’s too easily acquired. We forget that the listener makes the music complete. You’ve got to stop hiding in your record collection, and start letting it live through you.
My friends showed me some basic chords on the guitar. Up until now, it’s been a complete mystery how anyone gets any sounds of it. I’m thinking of buying a guitar now. My friend told me, if I played every day for a few hours, in one month, it wouldn’t be a problem to play “Love Me Tender.”
I remember seeing these pianos in the lobby of a Disneyland resort hotel that played themselves. As if there was a ghost sitting on the bench, you could see the keys rising and falling, pressed by some invisible fingers. And I thought, why learn an instrument at all, when it can be all automated? But it’s all too perfect – an automated piano is never going to make a mistake, an unexpected note is never going to appear, it’s never going to be able to respond to the changing atmosphere of the audience that surrounds it. It’s without intrigue. Which is why, even in the case of Jelly Roll Morton, I haven’t enjoyed piano rolls so much. Because they are fatalist pieces of music – their fate already sealed in plastic.
Let’s not forget one thing – recorded music was until the studio-as-instrument-age nothing more than air trapped.
Music ought to be a thing at least as moody as the weather.

Youth in Sea – Makuhari Messe

Sobu Sun Darkening

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

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.”

The major pastime in Tokyo, as I’m sure you can guess, is shopping. It’s the perfect thing to do on a date, because it takes the pressure off conversation. Across an aisle, over a display stand, your eyes meet, and you smile, and you begin the process of falling in love. 
I have one friend who I have gone shopping with many times. Often, at the point of purchase, she takes my cash, and pays with her credit card instead, because she gets points. I always wondered what she got with these points, and I couldn’t believe it when she showed me the catalogue. After all these times using her credit card, she gets to choose between a corkscrew, a pouch, or tupperware, as her 1999 gift from the credit card company. I nearly died laughing, nearly cried from laughing too hard. And so while she ordered in her choice on a pay phone, I leaned against the next phone over in the busiest train station in the world, feeling like I was in a movie I always wanted to be in, my own. 
I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s actually nothing to do in Tokyo, but shop. Spending money is like breathing here. Money circulates. It gets around. Fortunately, the shopping’s pretty incredible. Tokyo seems to break down into different districts which specialize in their own product. There’s Akihabara for electronics, Asakusa for Japanese traditional items, and of course Kabukicho for soiled underwear and other garments of Tokyo legend. My favorite area is Ochanamizu. There’s about two blocks with music equipment stores stacked one on top of the other. Then, there’s about four blocks of snowboard stores. No joke. I swear there are more snowboards on this block than there are in Canada. Finally, there’s a neighborhood of used bookstores. Apparently, there used to be a university near here, so these are used bookstores that are really old. I thought I’d look for a bargain paperback, but this was stuff for collectors, serious collectors – early 20th century editions, like an original copy of Oscar Wilde’s Salome in a glass case. What was strange is that I was all alone in most of these stores. And I wondered who in Tokyo could possibly be interested in these obscure books. Nobody even reads Somerset Maugham anymore.
 In the same district, there’s a used CD store named Disk Union. This particular locations is about 5 floors. But it’s not like the Tower, in which the whole building is a Tower building. This is more like a regular building with separated rooms intended for different stores, but instead every room is Disk Union. I went to the second floor for reggae, but ended up in a room filled with bluegrass, and was directed across the hall to the reggae room. This is the first store I’ve been in with a used Tango section. 
Somewhere in Ochanamizu, I’ve heard about a CD rental store, where you can get Bjork bootlegs and other obscure recordings. I’m getting an 8track and a CD burner next week, and I may never buy another CD in my life.

A few nights ago, I visited a British friend. On our way back to his place, he picked up a used record player at a junk shop. All it needed was a needle change, but before I knew it we had the whole turntable arm in pieces. After much fucking about, we got the record player going, but at a very low volume. If nothing else, it would be a good decoration, I thought, as I watched a green slab of volume spinning around peacefully. Vinyl’s a pain, but it’s got a future. Vinyl’s got wa, it’s got inner life qualities. Original editions matter. But as far as CDs our concerned, a burned copy is as good as the original.



(The Strange Dreams A Traveler Has … continued … This was written from 3:55 AM to 4:20 AM in my bedside notebook.) By candlelight, I’ll try to recall some details. So much of what I dreamt is inexpressible, hyper-dimensional — these bits of pieces of image left in my mind seem to travel in flashes, and though the images are still fresh, they don’t even seem to belong to a dream narrative. And again, as I have before, I ask, is it possible that we dream more than one dream at the same time? Maybe we dream in different channels and perhaps sometimes these channels collapse into one another. 
So, a friend and I were walking in an underground network of passages, not unlike the kind of web I walk through in Tokyo everyday. My friend was smoking the strangest brand of cigarettes – they seemed to come from the pockets of a surfer – there were bits of sand in the pack, and the cigarette tubes all seemed to have the appearance of having been wet and then dried. I grabbed a cigarette, but as is my custom, I suggested we find a better place to smoke in the open air. I guided him out of one of the many possible exits, insisting I knew a good one. We emerged from the exit to such a wonderful sight – across the small street, not more than 40 feet away, waves were crashing against the rocks and we stood in the seaspray. The waves were so strong – it seemed an ordinary day, judging by the skies and the feeling in the air, but the waves were spilling over onto the highway. Above and behind us, there was a steep bank. And during high tide, I got the impression that the ocean would rise up this bank, placing the road 20 or 30 feet under water. Now, the strangest thing, the reason I’m telling you about this dream (cause it’s true that most dreams are unremarkable enough that they’re not worth further discussion) – water creatures could be seen swimming through the air, as if they had not caught up to the tide, as if the low tide had left them behind. And then, I, myself, was able to float in this air that seemed to be haunted by the memory of being water to the point that it exhibited the same properties. I had to kick my legs to get back down to the level of the road, which was by now mostly covered with water and sand, since the tide seemed to be rising. If I stretched my body horizontally, I floated upwards, hovering at the same level as the top of the bank — I guess you could say, it was the surface at which air meets air. A girl, a fellow traveler in this strange scene, panicked because a strange sea creature got caught in her hair. And how strange this creature was – about the same diameter as a plum, it seemed to be a hybrid of a furry spider and an octopus. But a surfer I barely remember speaking to later in the dream insisted it was quite common for these creatures to get in your hair, and that they were in fact quite harmless.
 And now fortunately after 30 minutes of writing and straining to remember, I have faithfully recounted the contents of the dream. And now I excuse myself to return to sleep, though incredibly hungry. I’ll wake up again in 5 hours, and instead of exiting sleep and ending up near an ocean, I’ll simply be in the same place as usual, and bravely I’ll have to face everyday life, the scariest thing of all. 


Nothing is strong enough to come between me and my present reality. I cannot concentrate long on any book, any movie, any music. In fact, I haven’t seen a complete movie for over 5 months now. I’m so deep into this Tokyo existence that I cannot for a moment separate myself from it. But, I’m separate from Tokyo itself, a foreigner outside enough that I’m outside of any culture. I’ve been from floating in my own separate realm of thought. New levels of introspection. A kind of solitude I’ve not previously known. I am unable to reach that willing state of disbelief in which the pleasure of art for many lies. Escapism is not an option. And any art of the in-your-face variety seems more like an intrusion into my personal ego space, these days. Wherever I go, I cannot leave the present behind. But it’s an eternal present, a timeless present – the past and future have collapsed. Time’s off its track. The clock ticks in ways unknown. Every sentence I reads ends not with a period, but rather with a space, a space that I stare deeply into for a moment long enough to forget what I have just read. 
For better or for worse, life seems to have become an extended dream. Dreams are neither good nor bad. Things just happen. But whatever happens in a dream, I never find myself reading anything or listening to any music or watching any movies. Everything just evaporates and transforms, melts into air. 
In the Fall of 1998, I watched about 25 movies during two weeks of the Vancouver Festival. I have documented my feelings on this in the introduction to the recent Space Age Bachelor. I would document them further, but it would be at the risk of plagiarizing myself. Since that Festival, it’s been difficult for me to watch movies. I’ve only seen just a few in the theatre since then. I developed a bad habit of getting movies from the public library, and either not watching them or not finishing them, and then having to pay late charges on them. I still owe various libraries money for fines uncollected. 
In the early Winter of 1999, I was excited because there was a run of movies by the Taiwanese director Edward Yang at a Vancouver cinemateque. From the movie I saw, I recall the classic line, “We plant bombs in each other. These bombs are still ticking.” But otherwise the movie, whose title I cannot remember, well, how do I explain my feelings watching it? I couldn’t stand its silences. It seemed to say nothing to me about my life, but rather it multiplied the loneliness I felt in the dark theatre, as if it was moving on a feedback loop. Forty minutes into the movie, in a dark apartment room, a woman, alone, puts on a 7 inch. The camera catches the turntable, and the lovely sound of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” fills the cinema and the director wisely allows the song to play for its duration. And such a feeling of peace sweeps over me. And I want this feeling to stay. And so I left the theatre, and never saw the end, and never saw the next movie on the double bill. And fortunately I was alone.