The Regular

Another one of those Saturdays .. you know how they are by now, but this one was particularly memorable so I'd like to record it. For the record.

Got home in the morning at 5ish after the first mixing day for the new Jungle Mic tracks, two out of three of which are now as good as finished, with the last one scheduled for next Thursday. Listened to the tracks at home for about an hour, then crashed around 7ish. Woke up at 12 to go teach dance at Ego. Which was fun! The team of beginners is really good with remembering moves, and they're all very excited. So intense dancing until 5, and then straight to Sanjo: another street jam with Jungle Mic. Jodie (percussion) and Saitou (tenor sax), our two recent support members (and on the new recordings as well) were there too, which always fills the band out nicely and makes the sessions that much more fun. But today was an exceptional day in many ways.

First, I've started calling it summer since a week or two ago, and today was a great, cloudy, warm day. LOTS of people out, and I mean LOTS. They even made the bicycle parking legal now at Sanjo! Wtf!? Though I think there is zero correlation, there was a HUGE load of bikes as well. More than that: as opposed to most of the time, many people weren't just there for meeting up with their groups before heading out, but tons of people were really there for the chillin'. Sitting & listening, dancing, singing along to our songs and jams, the vibe was great. But that wasn't all! Today we had an extraordinary amount of people join us in sessions as well. I just wanna list this because it was so sweet and I can't imagine this happening in, say, Amsterdam.

The random people that we jammed with today:

- A tapdancer from New York in the funkiest outfit ever, with afro and everything
- The chick who played sax on 'Party People' on a previous Jungle Mic recording (so we had 2 saxes today, pretty cool)
- some chick playing some gloomy blues/jazz on the keys
- a dude with a Kaossilator..fuck, that is one SWEET toy. Oh and he also played bass with us.
- a group of 5 MCs who were quite good and totally pumped up the atmosphere; all the chillin people loved it
- a chick with a beautiful rough, deep voice; did some standards with her.
- MOMO!!! Jungle Mic's substitute bassist from when Kim was injured, and who was the bassist at the time I joined Jungle Mic. He has a killer groove, and his technique is sweeeet ... we had a long session with him and I was completely lost in it ... I forgot about everything else in the world and was just rolling along on the groove with my clav.

Seriously, I haven't rolled this hard in a looooong time. I was running around between my keyboard & mic, the drum kit, Jodie's sample pad & percussion table, dancing with Ikeyan & a buddy of his who was over from Chiba for the weekend, and making all the people sitting/standing around join in (the 3-year old boy gave the djembe one hell of a beating! Lol that was hilarious). Just BEING! No thoughts, just oneness with the world...and FONK.

Also got to chat with the youngest Jungle Mic fan around, a 3ish-year old extremely cute girl who apparently follows our activities (together with her mom) like crazy! Checking the website, going to gigs (they were apparently there on my first gig with JM, back in the days when Tetchan was also still in the band and we did dance battles in the middle of each gig...wow, those were the days), etc.! Sooooo cute ... I totally hope to meet her again.

At 23:30 then, the generator ran out of gas just when I'd finished singing/rapping the first verse of my Saturday Morning Blues, and we called it a day, though we stuck around for a couple of hours more.

Tomorrow we have a gig in Shiga, so I'm off to sleep!

I love it here.

Fireflies & Deep House

Just got back from an early firefly viewing. Early in the sense that the firefly season - early summer - is just beginning, and there were no more than seven fireflies to be found along the entire Philosopher's Path. But that means there were very few people as well, so it was a relaxing nightly walk. Also crossed a small electric fence and headed up the hills and into the mountains, through a couple of torii and past a waterfall or two aided by my phone as a flashlight.

At some twenty minutes walking distance from my place! Damn I'm lucky.

Now to finish this rare free evening off with some nice deep house and a fried egg or two.

Ben Watt & Jay Hannan - Lazy Dog, an excellent double deep/jazzy house album I found recently.

Photographs Taken With The Camera On My Phone Which Is Getting More Scratched Every Month (But I Won't Buy A New One Until This One Completely Dies!)

Apologies for the delay! Without further ado, I present to you spring (and the last bit of winter) in Kyoto, 2009!

Off to sleep now! Getting my forehead restitched (to fix the scar left by the somewhat clumsy emergency stitching just after the crash 6 months ago) is leaving me with more pain than I anticipated .. they gave me painkillers and even antibiotics, but I'm just gonna try sleeping it off for now.

Organized by topic:

1. Spring pix. Though you might not think it, one becomes quite used to being surrounded by sakura blossoms while it's happening. Only a month later does one realize that that CRAZY FUCKIN EPIC time of year has passed again .. is it not like youth, that intangible part of life that seems to have slipped away just as one stops to think about it? Pink & white, parties everywhere ! I hear the sakura on Hokkaido have just started blooming now.














2. Other recent sightseeing. Arashiyama, Kurama and Kyoto itself. All within about one hour from the home. Yes my life rocks.















3. Osaka. The Nagisa festival (see my previous post), jammin with the boys from Ochre Caravan (who I just briefly mentioned a while ago - my music buddies with crazy-ass dreams in Osaka! Love 'em), and some random other pix. (The guy behind the drum set in the last pic with the Ochre guys is Ejoe, one of the originators of house dance, who hangs out in Japan quite a lot and was performing at the same event).












4. Jungle Mic. Also check out the video blog! Recordings are currently in progress, I'm going in for the keyboard takes tomorrow night!












5. Miscellaneous pix from in and around Kyoto. Dance, basketball, getting plastic boxes from a dude that just finished the six year program I just started my second year of and Benkei moving them for me using my bike (which is falling apart by the way but I can't find a good, cheap second-hand one now so I'm walking everything these days), and so on!
















There you have it! Now go watch the LOST season 5 finale so you can join me in enjoying the last year of our lives before the show ends, we become complete and our purpose in life is lost...

Laterrrrrrrrrrr!