Tokyo's Coolest Combo!

As most people know, my taste in music is questionable at best, having no real allegiance to a particular genre, as a music snob ought to. I may write about the lyrical stylings of a Shiina Ringo (the link is to her most recent single) or Regina Spektor in my academic work, but my Meizu is just as likely to be playing the occasional Pantera or Otsuka Ai.

But P5 (Pizzicato Five, above), are different somehow, though I suppose a lax writer, i.e. he who wields the verbal laxatives, would call them kitsch (is our language so impoverished we have to resort to German to describe these things?). Even so, there is a certain comfort in kitsch similar to the way scifi movies make it seem as if the future will be breathtakingly homogenous, though we know in our hearts that we carry the specters of our technological past with us wherever we go. The pure kitsch (smeared like the fluffiest, whitest frosting over everything crumby) seeks to do the same thing to the past. Oddly, then, what appeals to me about this gaudy trash is its seeming incongruity with the reality before our very eyes.

In Japan, the vanguard of kitsch is called, ironically, Village Vanguard, not the famous New York jazz club that spawned the careers of so many musicians and poets alike, but a trendy chain "culture store" selling the trappings of by gone eras: magic eightballs, mod furniture, spiked chokers, etc. I know it as one of the few places to get a proper Dr. Pepper when I want one, and I guess the Engrish stickers are pretty amusing too.

P5 are a thing of the past now, having broken up in 2001, but I still like to carry them along with me on my walks through that other Japan, where everything isn't either blazing neon or idyllic mountainous countrysides covered in mist. More often than not, it's a rusty honda someone left on their lawn, because it's too expensive to pay all the [bribes] needed to operate a used car for an indefinite amount of time.

Translating Sappho into Breakfast

Inspired by our man in Madrid, who, because he's far more rigorous (and thus virile, I suppose) than I, regularly (like a bran-laden bowel movement) posts about crap that isn't completely inane, I have decided to give a little insight into the kinds of things that actually make it into my dissertation. So, straight out of my notebook from yesterday, I begin, as always, in medias res:

Shit, I just lost my train of thought, because an (uptight) attractive woman walked into the donut shop, and for a moment I was intoxicated with the line of her legs. Where was I?

Translators of ancient poetry, my (elitist) shorthand for poetry that exists in numerous often inconsistent iterations, who usually have a critical tradition to rely on, typically ally themselves (or refuse to) with one of various pedantic positions regarding textual transmission before rendering the text into a target language. Where Sappho invokes none other than Aphrodite to be her ally (Aphrodita yada yada yada su d' auta / summakhos esso), translators are dependent upon certain minor deities ("if this reading [Diehl's 1923 conjecture] is correct, Sappho may be pursuing her own night thoughts... or else participating in a nocturnal ritual." {all quotes are from Anne Carson's translation of Sappho, If not, winter}).

When rendering a text there are always two kinds of remainder: the grease in the pan and the crispy fat left on the bacon. After all, it's not really bacon if you melt it all off. That fat is part of the its flavor:

of gold arms [
]
]
doom
]

I suppose nowadays most people throw away the grease in the pan, but I, being very much an old-fashioned guy and very much my father's son [at which point I genuinely started to cry in the middle of a Mister Donuts, much to my embarrassment], see that shimmering pool of artery-clogging death and feel compelled to make it part of my French toast or eggs or even the occasional plate of hash browns. Nothing (and certainly no one) is harmed by throwing it away, but it seems like such a waste.

I don't fault Carson for leaving anm [in the Greek of the fragment there's a barely legible alpha-nu-mu in the line just above the one she translates "doom."] as it is; there are so many things it could be, which makes these three letters truly untranslatable, even back into Greek. Besides, some random conjecture would ruin the poetic force of that single word "doom" and turn the bacon into burnt, inedible crud.

Benzie goes solo

So, I've had that video up for a few days now; seems I have a little splainin' to do. Most of what follows comes as a result of some conversations with Pacchan and Gimlet in P's ongoing battle to counter "the jazzy," as she puts it.

Asai Kenichi, the titular Benzie, recently went solo after years of drifting around his and other people's bands. It's difficult to get across exactly what kind of rock god he is here (and why he has gone mostly unnoticed by the whitey expats who call this "land" home). One part of my brain says he's like a Japanese Bowie, but his music is nothing like Bowie's, another part of my noodle would characterize him as the musician all the critically acclaimed artists adore.

I'm something of a recent convert to the cult of Benzie and his best known band, Blankey Jet City, but one of my favorite artists, Shiina Ringo, has long been an acolyte in his church.

Imagine me, a wide-eyed undergrad, impossibly thick Greek text in hand, walking across what, from the benefit of hindsight, was in fact a beautiful brick laden quad in the "center" of the University of Missouri campus. In my other hand, I'm carrying a dispenser of my then semi-secret love, an electric blue CD player. The Innocence Mission's "Snow," a song that to this day I can listen to on repeat for hours because it immediately takes me back to those cross campus treks to my Geology class (another secret love), is coming to an end, and AJICO's "Hadou" fades in. I'd downloaded it, because one of my favorite jazz/r&b singers UA had recently joined the band and released this single. It's the kind of song that I stop everything for and listen to in its entirety.

Both Karen Peris and UA have the kind of voice that grates on some peoples' nerves, but I get hypnotized every time.  It's almost as if their voice is a mood, independent of happiness or sadness or hate or love, a mood that always carries with it a kind of poignant melancholia.  Theirs is the kind of music the youngins ignore, because their brains are used to being overloaded on the sugary pop or speedy death metal whose only virtue is how the excessively distorted chords hide how god awful the lyrics are.  The urgency that UA and Karen have is what Benzie has too.  Whether you like it or not, you can't help but listen.

In my recent spat of paying obeisance to Benzie, I discovered he was part of AJICO and had written "Hadou."

It seems I've been a fan for a long time.

Benzie

a-Whoooo arrrrre ha-Yooo?

So, methinks it best, having impressed myself on dear friends of most infinite patience, to compose, as it seemed suited to the occasion, a few lines of verse, by which my dears might know the degree of my gratitude.  In other words, one last morning dookie:

mike's hookah

he bought it the other day; we told
him to keep the noise down, but
his greasy tobacco's in the fridge,
the ceramic top with the mugs.

the metal pan is with the pots;
the hose is by the vacuum.
just yesterday I put fresh cut
flowers in seemingly a vase.

he smokes the damn thing for hours -
each day - he does - we all
tag along: everything impenetrable
to light but not to smoke.

And the following I managed to put together while Pacchan was grunting intermittantly over a conference abstract, Gimlet was FLYING THRU THE UNIVERSE WAHOO!!!!, and I was staring at the VCR while chugging a Diet Coke.

her hair was Hi-Fi silver
draping the VCR;
a bluescreen with hashmarks told me
she'd been playing me and would
againagain - beginagain;
the tape keeps winding and un-
doing her blouse, buttoning mine
one at a time to rewind our trist:

her skirt is a coaster to her waist,
and my hand reaches for the handle.

That last one's not so great, I know, but we can't all be cheeky MFAs in poetry slowing me down as I'm just trying to catch my fucking bus, dammit!