drowning in the why, starving for the how

This is a feeling I often have when teaching my “modernology” class–which is about how people in Japan have developed ways to understand and get to being modern. Modern in a myriad of ways–from sitting on street-corners and drawing people in kimonos and putting them in bar graphs compared to people wearing “western” clothing, to measuring the GNP, to listening to insects to hear if they still sound like they “did” in 11th c. imperial manuals of poetry, to tracking who practices inter-racial international marriage with whom.

The “5 Ws and an H” stuff is hard to come by, and I can understand why, given the focus on stereotype that drives what seem to be the same 5 stories about Japan, written in the rapidly dwindling number of papers that have foreign bureaus.

Students–I mean undergrads here–are often remarkably stubborn about releasing their a priori judgements. Many if not most of which come from  ideas derived from wartime and Occupation-era military anthropology–all those “shame” versus “guilt” studies, the mandatory kissing in movies to show democracy, and on and on. So this statement, in a book I’ve been reading about the Free Software and Open Source software movements, rang true, recommended by my friend J. This is from Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

It would be interesting to apply this to, say, cell-phone novels, or video-game music like Katamari Fortissimo Damacy, whose plot is driven by a breakway incident of binge-drinking…

… it is in Free Software and its history that the is-
sues raised—from intellectual property and piracy to online po-
litical advocacy and “social” software—were first figured out and confronted. Free Software’s roots stretch back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the innovation of organizations and “virtual” collaboration, and the rise of networked social movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have occurred, but rather how individuals and groups are responding: by creating new things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms of life—not the software itself—that are most significant, and they have in turn served as templates that others can use and transform:
practices of sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s globalization, it’s the network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat earth, it’s Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how.

and that was something completely different

From the official statement released today of Cramps’ lead singer Lux Interior’s death. In Glendale, not half a mile from my house.

Their distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom. He is a rare icon who will be missed dearly.

Influenced by the burgeoning punk scene in New York with bands like The New York Dolls and The Ramones setting the standard the two decided they would start their own punk rock band, The Cramps. In contrast to other punk bands at the time however, they also mixed a heavy dose of Rockabilly and B-movie imagery to form their own unique image. It was during this time that Purkhiser took the stage name Lux Interior, taking his name from a car advert. He also created a unique stage personia, one of a complete honky tonky punk wild man, or as one reviewer put it “the psychosexual werewolf/ Elvis hybrid from hell”. The genre they helped create was later known as “Psychobilly” even though Interior denies that that is what their music really is. In 1978 The Cramps showed the world just how deep their love for the weird and the off beat went when they gave a free concert to the patients at the Nappa Valley State Mental Institution. The next year The Cramps released their first official EP, “Gravest Hits”. That same year they released their first LP, “Songs the Lord Taught Us”.

I saw them in SFO, it must have been 1992 or 1993. They were mesmerizing. The pacing was tight, saucy, sweaty, and fun as hell, decadent and seemingly indestructible. I always thought they were an LA band all around, but Cleveland makes sense.

And last but not least, cha cha cha.

ymo discommunicates on Soul Train

I’m still on something of a YMO tear. Here they are in a 1980 shoot of Soul Train, showing and telling one of my favorite Japanese words, discommunication. It’s not miscommunication, which often results in wounded egos and trade frictions. The ‘dis’ is not the same ‘dis’ of dis-respect, it just means that whatever came out of your mouth or pen or vocoder completely bypasses where it’s supposed to hit. The utterance goes off into outer space, and sender and receiver both go their separate ways. One example I like is what Faulkner said, in a 1955 visit sponsored by the State Department, aka his anti-Communist tour: talking to his hosts was like two people running at top speed on opposite sides of a plate glass window. You get that feeling, more or less, in this clip.

Here Don Cornelius leads in to the q-and-a by admitting to no notion of geography. I’m not sure where I would look to find YMO on a map, myself, given their penchant for city songs (T-O-K-Y-O), as well as chinoiserie (Tong Poo) and more chinoiserie with goofy breathy French dubbing (La femme chinoise). But I think his point was that YMO seemed like they were from really far away, and that if he had at least read the Encyclopedia Britannica memo, he might have had a better take on the mystical whatever of their five-piece combo form.

DC actually gives a really good example of techno-orientalism in this exchange. Throwing up his hands (metaphorically) in bemusement at the discommunication, he horses around with drummer Takahashi Yukihiro–a famous glam rocker who used to be in a Yoko Ono parody band that turned real, called the Sadistic Mika Band. After the band intros, he asks Takahashi to explain “Einstein’s theory of relativity.” This is 2 years after the Walkman debuted, and the portrait of Japanese man-on-the-street as the next-door neighbor of rocket science is well on its way.

I have to say that I found YMO’s plant in the audience, the guy designed to break the fourth wall between the stage and the dance floor (“Japanese gentlemen please stand up!”), to be a bit odd. A guy in a 3-piece grey flannel-ish suit does not seem to help their own purported cause much—the de-mystification of exoticism (yellow magic, fetishism), and its postwar Occupation stereotypes.

The customizing of lyrics, in the Archie Bell song they perform, “Tighten Up,” is kind of great, though–the narration is provided by a pretty famous Japanese radio guy, Kobayashi “Snakeman” (in homage to “Wolfman” Jack) Katsuya. The plant gets so into the actual show, as the band performs, that he keeps dancing and forgets his lines, which is also kind of cool, so I guess the whole image does get a bit unhinged. The keyboardist, Aki’s, buoyant hopping is pretty great, too.

archaic YMO c. 1978

Some interesting interview footage with the three + members of YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra). The venue is the studio in which Solid State Survivor, the second album, was put together.

I say “+” because usually they have “fourth man,” the synth programmer MATSUTAKE Hideki on deck, but I’m not sure how many people are in the shadows here, in and among the gadgets.

Around 1:10 is a funny sequence where SAKAMOTO Ryûichi shows-and-tells how hard it is for a human to manipulate the piano keys fast enough to get the tempo he wants (it’s in Japanese, but you can see/hear clearly what is going on by watching the demo).

ruin(ed) tourism in Japan

Is there anything more poignant than a theme restaurant gone to ruin? Two theme restaurants gone to ruin?… Here, the Restaurant Chateau. This is a shot from a blog I have been reading, entirely devoted to photography of the ruin–more precisely, walking tours of ruins documented in photograph.

One of my students, Y,  had told me about the photo “boom” last year, but I had no idea that the walking tour was following in the hallowed footsteps of the “soundscape” tour, and any of a number of other walking tours very popular in Japan. There is, these days, even a blog called “Haikyo walker,” modeled on the popular walk-and-buy guides like Tokyo Walker, which give you tons of info about showings, new stuff to buy, date spots, and on and on, for about 450 yen–about 5 bucks at the sad exchange rate of today (90 to the dollar). This, in turn, has sprouted Yokohama Walker, Kansai Walker, Chiba Walker.

And when you get to Tochigi Walker, there is no magazine, only this, the ruin of a “highclass soapland.” (Soapland is a classy word for what used to be called a “Turk,” or “Turkish bath.” A high-end happy-ending type massage parlor.)

In the 1980’s, tourism was government-endorsed and built on the urban planning idea of “machi-tzukuri,” or town-making. After the bubble burst, tourism became also taken up in very DIY ways that were still linked to older practices–like the pilgrimage and the literary walk. Most of these photos are placed in the countryside, places that have been “hollowed out,” or made Wasilla-like as they are unlocalized at the same time as they are linked to multiple scales of other places, some of which are very far away. (I don’t like the sneering potshot tone of this video, the typical provinciality of the meteropole guiding with very restricted vision. But it makes some good connections…).

It’s a fascinating look, also, at how a country sees itself in decline (ok, a few people), after the bubble bursts. A former empire, no less. And what they choose to do with those ruins.