I Am For The Life Around The Corner

... especially when it's a zombie that needs a good bullet between the eyes.  But that discussion comes a little later.

Okay, so full disclosure: I wrote the bottom part of this post first because I was stricken with the need carry on about Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry for whatever reason this morning.  What I had originally intended to be a couple of paragraphs blew up into something much longer, so my goal in doing some postmodern (WHAT IS POSTMODERN ANYWAY?  Fuck it, I'm using it as a blanket term) storytelling by coming back to the beginning and referencing myself is to make this first section thrilling and exciting so that it either compensates for the self-indulgent bloat at the end, or keeps everyone entertained enough that they can't get enough of my narrative voice that they read a giant missive about something only I care about.  

Nihon-wise, a lot has been going on here.  Schoolwork has been schoolwork, though there was an interesting point last week where I gave a presentation on some of my research about Oe Kenzaburo and his views on postwar Japan specifically in conjunction with the dropping of the atomic bomb.  I felt like the reaction was "oh hey, she's more than just karaoke, cocktails and Simpsons references" and maybe a little of "ah, maybe she's not blowing smoke up my ass about wanting to be an academic," but that could come as a result of my own self-doubt on the subject.  I've also been cracking wise about our textbook because there are some more bizarre scenarios for the conversations (such as a really labored discussion about 挨拶 or greetings on a date).  The other thing that I've noticed is that the sample sentences are getting pretty serious or emo at points, which I attribute to the editors having written so many damn textbooks at this point that they're tired of saying things about basic life in Japan or fucking 日米比較 (US-Japan comparison) that they're just going to have a field day.  To wit:

彼女は私を信頼していると思った。けれども、実際はそうではなかった。

She thought she could trust me, but in reality that was not the case.

せめてもの救いは、彼女が立ちなろうと努力していることだ。

The one saving grace for us is that she is mustering the effort to recover.

彼は妻の誕生日がいつなのかさえ覚えていないほど妻に関心なかった。

He has so little interest in his wife that he cannot even remember her birthday.

There were others, but those were the ones I could find right now.  I should start highlighting them in my textbook and keep a log of them because there's every once in awhile where I'm reading through as I do and then scratch my head and wonder where the hell that came from.

Hmm, what else has been going on... Well, there was last week when a group of us went out for samgyapsal (fatty Korean pork), that ended rather interestingly.  It's been a topic of discussion at school and I won't get into it too much here.  You can check out my photos from the fun part of the night here on Facebook, but suffice it to say the end of the night ended with a whole of yelling and asshole-ry.  I don't regret yelling at people, but I do regret becoming those foreigners you see on weekends making a scene and behaving in a way they probably wouldn't at home.  Now I no longer feel entitled to walk past those groups and pass judgment ("GOD you all make us look bad") because now I've been there and I try to leave the stones on the floor in my glass house.  There was also my exciting 3+ walk home because the 終電 we caught didn't run through to Yokohama, but I probably needed that to help me to sober up.

I already can't believe we're almost through the first week of December and that we'll be on winter break soon.  I flashback to this point 5 years ago when I was 2 or 3 weeks away from getting on a plane back to the US and the panic that had already set in.  I was definitely not ready to come home yet, and since I like to worry myself unnecessarily, I was dreading my departure as early as November.  I'm pretty damn thankful not be going through that again, and I know I haven't even begun to crack the surface of living in Japan.  10 months in and of itself isn't long enough, but at least I get that this time around rather than the 4 I had as a senior in college.  I came back home with the worst reverse culture shock and it took me more than a month to get over it.  Now I have plenty of time to have more embarrassing experience, such as when I was at the conbini a couple of weeks ago buying dinner and the clerk brought out this mysterious box after I had paid.  She told me to take something, but I looked at the box and was like WHAT IS THIS, I THOUGHT I WAS DONE SPEAKING JAPANESE.  Instead of taking, in my confusion I tried to put the receipt in the box and the clerk stopped me and reminded me to take something.  It's almost as though I wasn't listening, because I got even more flustered (I'm sure my face was bright pink at this point) and thinking it was a fundraiser for breast cancer or something, I threw in a 100 yen coin, at which point the clerk physically demonstrated that I needed to stick my hand in and pull out a card.  I got a free coffee or something like that, which the clerk had to run to the back of the store to get, and when she came back up to the front I sheepishly asked for my 100 yen back... God I felt like such a jackass.  I told this story in class last week and Aoki-sensei laughed his head off at me. Don't let this Asian face mislead you.

This week I also have KT to thank for eating meals that are things other than curry and instant ramen.  I had some delicious kimchi nabe (kimchi hot pot) on Wednesday, and then last night she was nice enough to make us Indian curry (much different from the stuff I make by the gallon for the entire week).  I also felt a little bad bashing the movie we watched since it's one she really likes (Be Kind, Rewind), but different strokes as they say.  I think what frustrated me the most that I didn't articulate at the time was that it was a movie that thought it was a lot smarter than it actually was, and the same way that one of the characters complained that Driving Miss Daisy was condescending, I felt like Michel Gondry was just as condescending to his audience.  You're also going to have a difficult time convincing me that any remake - no matter how much creativity is used on a shoestring budget - is ever, ever going to compare to the original Ghostbusters.  Just isn't going to happen.  And there I go criticizing the movie again, so I will stop.  The other fair point here is that movies I generally enjoy do not have heavy themes or deal with deeper subject matter.  If shit explodes and I get a laugh or two, I am content.  And the fact that the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles continues to make me laugh until I fall out of my chair snorting with laughter even though I have to have seen it more than 100 times at this point should tell you I'm not in any position to take over for Manohla Dargis (God I hate that woman; she's a good part of the reason I stopped reading The New York Times movie reviews). 

Also this Friday was Chris' birthday ３次、四次会... I honestly lost count of how many places we went to.  We finally did 飲み放題 at an izakaya in Nogechou, and we were all feeling pretty good when we left after 6:30.  Though I am pretty sure we left about half of IUC's collection of umbrellas at that place because we all came in with them due to the crazy fucking storm that ripped through here on Friday morning.  However, we drifted right past the stand where we had left them... whoops.  I also go to introduce Sydnie to the wonders of 杏酒, which has the distinct pleasure of being an even girlier drink than 梅酒.  I think we also toasted to Leslie Nielsen a couple of times in that night.  Speaking of, here's my video montage to the man.  Another sad day for my childhood:

I wish I had had a camera for Friday, and I actually brought mine with me not realizing the battery was dead.  Blargh.  Anyway, we went from 飲み放題 to another izakaya, lost a few people but then gained even more.  More drinks, more food, more laughs, Haitham started singing Christmas carols, I attempted "Last Christmas," and everyone seemed to have a really good time.  And then the bloodthirsty among us went and tackled this:

Yeah, that's right, my fellow zombie killers and I finally beat House of the Dead 4.  I don't want to know how much money I have spent on this game already, but there is just something so satisfying about shooting these fuckers in the head.  And then I did an awkward little dance.  Sadism is fun.  I think I've mentioned this before, but there was some House of the Dead pro hanging out around the system the last time I played and he explained to us that this game in particular is the only one set to Very Difficult in the Kanto region.  Makes the taste of victory all that much sweeter, though I wonder if I might also be tasting the splash back of zombie brains.  

Also, I made this:

YOUR PHOTOS ARE NOT SAFE FROM ZOMBIES AND NEITHER ARE YOUR PENGUINS.  If you don't know what I'm referencing here, I am so sad because I haven't introduced you to the greatest photobomb in the world and you cannot convince me this is shopped because I refuse. 

From there we wandered back out in the street and hung out in front of a ドン・キホーテ, which I can only think to romanize as Don Quixote, though I can't imagine this place has anything to do with the actual book.  It's a cheap EVERYTHING store... I don't know what else to call it.  That's when 1 of 3 drunk salarymen fell in front of Chris and he struck a conversation with them and before we knew it, a group of us were in a bar doing more 飲み放題.  To be honest, though, I haven't felt this invisible in awhile; I have come to expect it from Japanese men because what's the point of a foreign girl who speaks spotty Japanese if she looks like she should speak it like a native?  I'm not knocking myself here, but that's been my impression every time I've been around Japanese guys, and this experience was of no exception.  I tried to join the conversation, but ultimately just sat back and enjoyed my drinks.  I could use the Japanese practice, but why fight the current?  It is frustrating to feel like people don't even notice you're there, but such is life.  This is also what makes dating in this country a near impossibility.  But hey! at the end of the night, our new friends picked up the tab.  I had already missed my last train and walked home, but we were at Yokohama-eki and it wasn't a big deal.  I really needed to pee en route and stopped off at a random park, which in retrospect was probably not the smartest move, but I came out better able to walk at least.

I best be wrapping this up now since believe it or not, this is about half-way through this post.  It's just more more homework and applications this week, nothing terribly exciting until probably Friday when we can kick up some some more trouble.  I promise not to get into any fights, I promise.

ETA: one last thing before I leave you to the rock gods.  If you ever get me talking about architecture, art, or fashion, my one guiding principle is that there needs to be symmetry.  There are some exceptions to this rule of course, but even with clothes these days the prevalence of asymmetrical sleeves, pintucking and details drives me bonkers.  When used correctly, asymmetry can be a pleasant punch of the unusual, but for the most part I think it's abused as a way to try to make an otherwise boring dress more interesting.  The fact I'm obsessed with symmetry is pretty keeping with my anal, Type A personality and every once in awhile if I'm sitting in a room and I notice the tiles are misaligned in the ceiling I will find myself mentally rearranging things so that the corners sit straight.  I am about 2 steps away from full blown OCD.

But as I discovered yesterday, perhaps Japanese is the perfect language for me.   I was standing looking at a sign reflected in glass and could not figure out what I was reading due to what follows.   As a result, I have discovered a the ultimate palindrome (apparently called a 回文) in Japanese:

 

This is how you write "sa" in Japanese in hirgana for the uninitiated. 

 

 This is "chi" in hirgana.  This was the character I saw reflected in mirror, but I was very much confused because さ and ち look awfully similar, don't they?  Check this:

 Behold!  You put them together and they are "sachi" or "good luck/fortune."  But what is "good luck/fortune" backwards?

 THAT'S RIGHT IT'S THE SAME THING.  All right, fine, not perfectly, but c'mon, さ and ち are like mirror-images of each other.  Hence why I couldn't figure out what the sign said because that ち also looked like a さ when backwards.  But wait!  How do you write さち in kanji?

 Take a look at that.  I think you know where I'm going with this.  Let's do a little flip...

BAM.  That ain't voodoo magic.  That's symmetry, people.

And yes, I agree.  I think it's about time I had off from school because I think Japanese is melting my braaaaaaaaain...

*     *     *

And now for something completely different.

Fair warning: this next part of the post is pretty self-servicey in the fact I'm writing about something that as far as I know only I care about.  But hey, if you have even the remotest interest in Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry or perhaps want to hear me blow hot air and pretend like I know what I'm talking about, perhaps this is for you too.

Anyway, a couple of stray comments people have made over the past couple of days have led me to think about the evolution of Roxy Music and by proxy, its lead singer Bryan Ferry.  I went on a bit of a tangent in another post awhile back about this as well, and now I'm back here again.  Honestly, I've ruminated on this topic a lot since I first started listening to Roxy a few years ago because the creation of the band came as a result of the collision of the experimentalism that coursed through the late-60s worlds of art, fashion and music, and their work went on to influence the whole of the glam rock movement as well as proto, punk, post-punk, new wave and new romanticism that came in the mid-70s into the 80s.  One of my favorite stories about the band came when I think Phil Manzanera (lead guitarist) and Andy McKay (saxophonist and oboist... yeah seriously, Roxy had an oboist in their main line-up) were at a Sex Pistols concert in 76.  By this point, Roxy was already starting to feel old hat because music had taken a sharp left hand turn away from their lush production values and meticulous song construction to stripped bare 2:00 songs with little post-recording editing.  They met Johnny Rotten and perhaps even Sid Vicious if he wasn't passed out in a corner somewhere, and were nervous about it given the Pistols' reputation and feared a nasty reaction given the fact they were from different generations and the Pistols' whole schtick (yes, it was schtick, listen to Never Mind the Bollocks some time and tell me it isn't hilarious) was about tearing down the establishment.  However, Rotten came as close to gushing as he possibly could, saying how he had loved Roxy when he was younger and how their music had helped to influence his musical aesthetic as well.  It's hard to describe, but the obsession of punk music with celebrating the smoke in the air, the grit under your fingernails, and burn in your gut owes a lot to the aesthetic pursuits of glam and prog rockers; perhaps it's all about finding beauty in whatever you can around you.  When done right, both glam (or proto or whatever, I really despise talking about music in terms of genres: if you look at my iTunes, I've left the genre category empty because I'm just that bad ass) and punk both extremely romantic and glorify a closely-held truth (blah blah, people like to apply the term 'nihilistic' to punk music, but I don't because punks very clearly believe in something, they're just cynical about it); for Roxy, it was about the beauty of times past and loves never meant to be, and for the Pistols... well, The Clash is a better example here of a group of punks that believed the only way of building a better society was to tear down the old one.  Also, a lot of both genres comes out of The Velvet Underground, but I will save that discussion for another day. 

Aaaannyway, that was a little off from where I wanted to be.  Among any number of other weird topics we covered hanging out at 飲み放題 on Friday, the question came up about which celebrity is on your list of free passes with whom to have a dalliance that your SO could pass no judgment.  The answer I gave was Clive Owen (just watch Children of Men or better yet, Shoot 'Em Up, and you tell me otherwise), but in full disclosure, #1 on that list is definitely Bryan Ferry, but no one really knows who he is so I ran with a more recognizable name.  Beyond just being ridiculously handsome in his younger years (he's still a very good-looking older man), he's absurdly talented, and has this quirky awkwardness despite being a lead singer and creative machine that I find irresistible.  It was also his evolution that powered Roxy forward through at least their first 5 albums (which all came out within 3-4 years, and on top of that he released 2-3 solo albums in those years); Brian Eno was also important to understand their eponymous debut and then For Your Pleasure, but the creative force of the 2 Bry/ians was too much, and Eno eventually left the band for an awesome solo and production career, and also generated the Windows 95 sound of which we are all familiar.

Goddammit, this is going on longer than I had planned, but this is how much I have to say about the subject.  Ferry, however, remained fairly experimental through at least 1975 and then just a little bit into 76-77, which you can hear in both Roxy's albums and his solo work in those years, but by that point he'd also developed the nascent stages of his romantic-lounge-lizard-with-a-bad-case-of-ennui persona that would sticks with him till pretty much this day.  If you take a step back to consider, it's amazing to see how much he changed as an artist in the first 6-7 years of his professional career, and how he has basically stayed with the same aesthetic definitely after 1978.  It's not to say that his music all sounds the same in the last 30 years or so of his career, but it is also hard to compare it to the sharp differences between, say, Roxy Music and In Your Mind.  What happened, you ask?  Well, let me tell you.  This happened:

Ferry met a then 21-year-old upcoming model Jerry Hall for a cover shoot for Siren (seen above; Siren is also my favorite album of all time, but that is also a whole other blog post), and they quickly began dating and he proposed to her supposedly within 6 months.  But for anyone familiar with this period of music, the relationship Hall is most famous for is not Ferry, but her 20+-year long quasi-marriage to Mick Jagger, and she would leave Ferry after 1976 for Jagger (I also think about where the Stones were in this period and I'm sorry, but some of the stuff they produced after Goat's Head Soup in 1973 is pretty mediocre stuff).  Now I'm not saying I know Ferry personally at all and I'm not delusional enough to convince myself I have the power of insight into the lives of people I will never know, but if you go just by his career trajectory after the break-up, it's clear he took it really hard.  

If you ever give The Bride Stripped Bare a spin, it is basically a heart-breaking in 10 tracks.  It's kind of painful to listen to, but also fascinating when you think about how a lot of Roxy's music, despite its heavy romanticism, is all about cloaking those emotions in a thick layer of guitars, "treatments," and glitter.  This is about as raw as Ferry gets at any point in his career.  And I don't want to make fun of the guy, but he went through this kind of hilarious period where he grew out his beard and looked pretty much like the rest of us do when we're going through a break-up, only there are youtube videos of this.  Though I'm also sure there is a corner of youtube dedicated to people making video pleas to their exes, but that is a place I dare not tread.

When I was hanging out with some people yesterday, someone brought up the topic of Loveline with Dr. Drew (I'll spare you my diatribe about him and Celebrity Rehab) and the idea that if we suffer some kind of emotional or physical trauma as a child, our mental development likewise stops there; at least in some part, our minds are always at that stage due to the shock to the system.  I'm not sure how much I believe that, but for argument's sake, it does apply here if you think about Bryan Ferry's music career.  He got the shock of his break-up with Jerry Hall in 76, and his music since then has remained with the same themes, textures, images, and aesthetics.  Of course, a lot of this is evident in his earlier work (it couldn't have just come out of nowhere), but even his style of dress and presentation has pretty much stayed the same since 1976, 77.  Granted, there comes a time when you need to pack away all that eye glitter and leopard print jackets, but there was also no way the Ferry of 1976 could ever rekindle that experimental spirit that was so clear on Country Life or For Your Pleasure.

This is an argument that's hard to understand if you've never listened to Roxy or Ferry before, and it would be likewise just as difficult for me to try and post a few youtube videos to back myself up.  I'm also not trying to criticize him; to the contrary, the whole tuxedo-and-cigarette image that he's had for the past 30 years suits him very well.  By the same token, it's also why I treasure those first 5 Roxy albums over the last 3, though I do love Avalon maybe as much as Stranded.  I've also been pretty spotty with Ferry's solo career; I've got the early years down pat, but after 1980, I've been pretty あっち、こっち in listening to snippets, but not whole albums.  I do attribute my ability to listen to and appreciate Bob Dylan to Ferry however since up until Fery's album of Dylan covers, 2007's Dylanesque, I couldn't get through a Dylan album to save my life on account of his voice.  Also, I have Dylanesque signed and my fangirl heart just about exploded when I stood in front of Ferry for all of about 10 seconds.

Okay, so I have no idea how to end this post now since as usual I ran on much longer than I had intended.  I get a kernel of an idea and once I start going, I don't stop.  But hey!  Let's end with a dance party!  If you've made it this far in the post, you more than deserve it.  For awhile there, this song was probably my most played on iTunes, but then my hard drive got wiped clean.  I've since rediscovered it and I was basically dancing in the streets walking home last night to it.

Yup, and that's Jerry Hall at 1:57.  And if this song sounds at all familiar, it's a take on Canned Heat's "Let's Work Together."  That drove me nuts for awhile until I read something on the internets. And believe me, if I could find a Ph.D. program that would fund me to research Roxy Music, I would be on an entirely different career track.  This several paragraph missive is just the tip of the iceberg.