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!

Happiness

Jack Johnson - Sleep Through the Static (the song)

Today, a public holiday! *checks* The day of Showa (the previous emperor).

I just got home from Nagisa festival, where I went with Ikeyan and a work buddy of his from Kyuushuu, Nonchan and Reggae. What a day! Gorgeous weather, extremely colorful people, music spanning the spectrum from punk to techno, rock to jazz and even afrobeat, can you believe it!? 13 Japanese (including 3 percussionists) playing Fela Kuti covers as well as original material (which sounds identical!). Japan is a wonderful place. Good food, non-stop dancing and the festival atmosphere I hadn't seen for quite a while. Jodie told me he'd performed there once with Eric and the Tribe, so if he and I work on our two-person dance music fest, we might be able to perform there next October or next April. It seems the perfect venue for our kind of project, and I'd love to perform at this festival, so I'm all pumped to continue with it.

Skipping back to last night, I had dinner with Manchan (the flamenco guitarist that looks like an Italian pirate), after which I went to a house practice session in Fly dance studio and ended up crashing at Ikeyan's place, with 3 hours of sleep before waking up for the festival today. Some twelve hours of dancing in two days - exhausted but it feels great!

Coming home in a great mood, I also found out that U-T-A finally posted the next Jungle Lifestyle episode. Haha, I love these guys. To quickly recap the Jungle Mic activity of the past week and a half: a gig at Doushisha University south campus in the middle of nowhere on a beautiful sunny day; three days later, rainy, a gig at Big Cat, a very respectable live house concert hall in Osaka. That evening a certain lady from a certain company came to see our gig and have a chat with us, hinting at a very bright future for Jungle Mic !! So in order to make that happen, we're totally psyched for the recordings next month (three songs, 2 of which are uptempo and one a true ballad .. I'm sure you can find pieces of them scattered around the video blog). This time, I'll be adding lots of cool keyboard parts to fill the space, there will be percussion, raps by me and vocals by me and Yuuki, and even the sax player who I met on the riverside last Friday because I was attracted by his sound will probably make a presence in some or all of the songs (we jammed in the studio this week and it was good stuff)!! Wow, things really couldn't be more exciting.

Of course school is well under way as well, and it's not strange for me to be in the lab around 2 am lately, calculating propagators for the antifermions of quantum field theory. Tomorrow morning I have a presentation, and I'm kinda behind on my Anki reviews (and quite hungry besides), so I'll stop now.

A very happy day indeed.

P.S. Pics coming soon, I promise!!!

The Real Deal

Okay, so it's very annoying that I have to bend my neck every time I pass through a door, and that my bathroom mirror comes up to my chest if I stand normally. But honestly speaking, the practical inconveniences of Japan end right about there. In almost everything related to daily life, Japan is extremely convenient for anyone living here: public transport, public safety, supply of consumer goods (from apartments to second-hand clothes to electronics to books to 24/7 food), the cellphone system, etc.

Despite these luxuries, I am quite sure I won't live my whole life here. Of course my desire to see as many different corners of the world as possible is a major factor in that feeling. But there are other issues. And today, they seem quite heavy. So heavy, in fact, that it seems impossible to overcome them without sacrificing some things that lie quite close to the core of my being. On the other hand, I love a good challenge, and there will be goods and bads wherever you set foot in the world. Japan might not be that bad. For now, I'll leave things as they are and keep on living my life - a strategy which has proven itself often in times of philosophical impasse or other complicated situations. Personal conclusions and related important decisions are still a while away, and we will discuss the issues at hand many, many times before that, I'm sure.

So which issues, you ask? Here you go.

The above website gives a very good layout of what culture shock is like for most Western foreigners coming to Japan. In my first year in Japan (I had several parties this week to celebrate the one-year anniversary, by the way! You can look forward to the next blog entry), I've had to deal with many, but not all, of the issues the author describes, and it was a refreshing read for me; reminded me of where I'm standing right now. Though I doubt anyone can understand those issues without being in Japan for a long time, hopefully it'll help you to bring your (probably way-off) image of Japan a bit closer to reality. Hopefully it'll turn you on, rather than off, and stimulate your curiosity. Hopefully it'll motivate you to shake loose of the usual confinements of your world and stride into the wild universe out there.

To stimulate your curiosity even further, let me give you a teaser of what's to come on this blog. Just the other day, I mentioned I should start making a list of the small cultural differences between Japan and Holland so I can show it to people whenever they ask that dreaded question. Well, here it is! A beginning of the list of things that are strikingly different in Japan than in Holland (I keep using that country because I don't want to generalize to 'the Western world', though in many cases it might be just as appropriate...if I speak about languages the contrast is usually between Japanese and English, not Dutch). Compared to the being-'of-the-same-age'-if-you're-equally-old-on-April-1 quirk, the following things are kind of deep...but here goes!

• The meaning of love
• The rhythm and melody of language
• Music
• The concept of normality, or of absurdity
• The concept of quality
• Rationality
• Justice and its value
• Interpersonal relationships
  
• Sarcasm

Dear blog, dear readers: we have a lot to talk about.