Thursday, May 22, 2003
Clubola
Woo-hoo!Looks like I'm going clubbing here after all! Not that I don't like the museums and all, but it would be a shame to be in Tokyo and not experience any of the nightlife while I'm young enough to still enjoy it. I just got an email back from the people for
Xpander, a Dutch clubbing and rave magazine I did a photo gig for in San Diego. Click on party info, then Asia to see the link for Saturday night, "Spice! Chapter 7 Yellow (Tokyo)". Apparently the DJ is a bit finnicky about people being in the booth though, so it looks like the couple that regularly covers these events are doing the photos and I'm going to do a write-up instead. That actually works out great, since it'll be easier to email in some text before their deadlines then for me to deal with the hassle of touching up and uploading images on the road. The pics I put up in the earlier post required intense concentration to remember the right combination of keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop, since everything was in freaking Japanese!!! And don't even get me started on finding the @ character on different keyboards...
This is also cool because it would be fun to do some creative writing again. I used to love writing essays at all stages of my education, even through college. I've never gotten into journalism, but it's been germinating in my head recently as something I might be interested in. I've been kicking around the idea of doing some part-time gig the way I did with the club photography to see if it resonates with me at all. I figure I like reading so damn much, maybe writing will click too. That was one of my ulterior motives in launching this blog - giving myself a place to write every day, kick the rust off that part of the brain. I wonder what other bloggers get out of this? A similar writing release? Free therapy? A simple record of events for the sake of posterity? A way to stay in touch with friends? I wonder what keeps it going after the initial novelty wears off.
I'm in Tokyo now, this is where I'll be the rest of my stay. My parents and I just had a nice long dinner with a Japanese family that they first met 25 years ago when we first moved to the states. I'm almost exactly the same age as their eldest girl and we were best little buddies when were were 3 years old, for the six months that our fathers were guest researchers at Stanford, and this is the first I've seen her since. We have all these pictures of us cheek-to-cheek, we went everywhere together, so cute! My mom used to call her my first girlfriend. Typical girl, she has a longer memory than me and could actually remember some of her stay back then, but all she remembers is me pulling her hair. I wasn't as evil as that sounds! My mom explained that it was because I loved her hair so much and wanted mine to be like hers, so I would yank on hers to put on my head. I was obviously what some might call "developmentally challenged" or what others would classify as "retarded". She grew up to be quite the cutie! We talked quite a bit, as much as we could with the language barrier anyway.
I'm listening to Japanese imitation hip hop in the internet cafe, reggae-based beats are pumping through this place. Let me see... yep, the language change doesn't help, I still hate this genre. Rap music, listen up, you're played out, go away already. Blaxploitation is so done. I said I might help out Tricia with the web stuff of some "postive hip-hop" youth organization - I'll be curious to see how that goes, considering that after she emailed me about it a month ago, I ripped off a giant rant about the uninspired unoriginal soul-sucking commercial exploitative mysogynist racist Nat Turner-wannabe nature of today's rap music. You can call me bitter, I'm cool with that. She still put me on their mailing list, so I'm assuming she didn't hold it against me or has become used to hearing that perspective the more involved she's become. It's not like I'm some country bumpkin that never got rap - I was raised on it and steeped myself in it as much as anyone else. I lost the faith when I saw its true colors, that's all. Maybe working with Tricia will bring me back in the fold, that I'll be curious to see.
I wish I could write more. It's late (forget what the time stamp says, it's past midnight here), my brain is muddled from beers and wine at dinner and a lack of sleep and smog-induced allergy weirdness and the 16-hour time zone difference. The initial excitement of the clubbing news woke me up and now I'm pooped again, so I'm going to go pass out in my bling-bling swank hotel room. All-you-can-eat breakfast buffet in the morning, you better watch yourself! I'm gonna bring it like you ain't never seen. Sorry, I saw
Drumline on the plane ride here, that was stuck in my head.