constraint and fulfillment

out soon: "Multitude" ; 帰国まで３週間！！！

Ahhh....three weeks left in Japan.
Good news is, I may have secured a New Haven apartment!

NEXT! I am one of the contributors to a new photo book about bike culture around the world called 'Multitude' (yep, borrowed from Hardt and Negri). Brought to you by these guys at Pedal Mafia. I also did a bit of the translation work.
If you see it in stores (8/2~) give it a look!

There is a release party on the 16th. Hopefully I can make it, but things will be pretty hectic then since I depart for NYC on the 19th. Here is the party flyer for those bike-interested fellows in Tokyo who are reading this. The party is free and should be great fun. It is at Uplink deep in the Shibuya wilds. Their cafe is also a worthwhile place to visit if that is your thing. The best part is that the outside area is perched above the fray and gets nice breezes ...and surveillance! I was reading there a week back and noticed a police-commotion. Various earphone-wearing agents. A traffic cop ready to stop cars on a lonely back street. Something must be up. I continued my one-man study party but kept an eye out for developments.....15 minutes later I happened to see the empress be driven by in a caravan flanked by several security cars and police motorcycles. Neat.

In other news, we played a show last week at Nakano's Moonstep. One of the opening bands was the totally great ノンポリラジカル (Non-poli Radical)("non-poli" is a wasei-eigo term meaning non-political, or just not affiliated with a particular sect). NPR is a one man keyboard, electronic bleep-maker, and visuals show that looked a bit like this:

Ami was so kind as to take some pics of Dudman while we flailed about. Hmm, maybe I am the only one who flails. Thanks a lot, Morrissey. We played four new songs. This is a very big deal. The last new songs we wrote were....well, in 2003. So much for long-distance band productivity. Maybe I should consider the last 5 years a very long, very slow tour. Perhaps we need a tour t-shirt with the dates on the back. Ahh, that reminds me of a funny Dokken story. I'll have to dig up the shirt someday and post a picture, but the gist of the story is that on my 'Back for the Attack 1987-88 World Tour' shirt (or something to that effect) the only shows in 1987 were three shows in Massachusetts about a month before the rest of the tour started, and the only international date was Toronto. But hey, the '87-'88 WORLD tour makes for a lot cooler shirt. We gotta follow suit.

Dudman pics from Ami!

In yet more completely unrelated updates, Ami and I had a lovely trip to Izu for her birthday, Daniel successfully left Japan with 46 kilos of my junk (thanks Danny!), I am selling off the rest of my junk (post with the URL soon! well, it's HERE. not everything is up yet though), AND I went to a fireworks party with 20 former members of Mishima Yukio's private army, the Tate no Kai. Research interest be damned, the fireworks were great. And I managed to get some really nice shots. I'll post some up next time this departure madness lets up, but here a couple below. Okay, back to work!

From Tom Tomorrow.

Satire by the book:

The internets are full of declarative statements about satire these days, the most common of which being that “satire does not work unless it portrays its intended target.”

So let’s consider this image:

Clearly this cartoon doesn’t work at all, because there is no way for the reader to understand that its intended target was not Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden themselves. So let’s see what we can do to clarify things:

That makes the intention of the cartoon clearer — but there’s still room for improvement.

There! That’s much better! But maybe, just to be safe, we should take it one step further:

Okay then! With no room for misinterpretation whatsoever — that’s comedy gold!

Remember: satire does not work unless it literally portrays the intended target!

Vigilante salary-men vs the Power of Fruits

o o

some recent shots

Here are a few shots from the Mitama Matsuri at Yasukuni Shrine. I've been in and out doing interviews, but shutter-worthy moments are a frequent distraction. At the end is a shot from a friend's show. Mihoko definitely knows how to bass. But first.....

....the Snake Man!

.....and Snake Lady peepin'

Haunted House

....and one from Mihoko's show

back from Hokkaido (again)

I went north to observe some of the groups I study participate in the protests against the ongoing G8 meetings in Toyako, Hokkaido. Sapporo was a bit of a protest circus. Between anti-and pro-G8 rightists, leftists, anarchists, free Tibet-ers, Falun Gong-ers, Japanese police of every persuasion, dogs, horses, rock and roll dancers, and the rest of the menagerie that seems to appear in downtown Sapporo on any given weekend, it was a pretty exciting time.

The pictures have captions but are incorrigibly out of order. My apologies.
Here is my weekend in pictures (well, the stuff I can show here, anyway):

CLICK---> "My weekend in Hokkaido and the run-up to the 2008 G8 Summit"

...another late night in a Kabukicho basement

残り７週間 (Seven weeks left)

(come on back, Danny) (Roka-park is waiting)

８月１９日に帰国します。It's been fun. I hope the next seven weeks are as fruitful as the last seven have been.

June was a busy month. I was roped into giving a new version of the Hokkaido talk I mentioned a few posts back at the monthly lecture series hosted by one of the groups I study. It went fairly well, but I am still humbled by public speaking in Japanese. I get stuck on some honorifics and re-use the same phrases over and over. Perhaps not to an annoying degree for those in the audience, but I notice.....

That same week I gave an expanded version of the paper I gave in April at the AAS meetings in Atlanta at the Modern Japanese History Workshop at Waseda. Like the previous talk, I was flattered to get a large audience. I think I was a bit more competent in English. Of course the downside of the large turn-out is that we ended up more as a lecture and q&a session than a 'workshop.' That said, I was happy to get some really useful and provocative comments both during the q&a and afterward over dinner and drinks.

Then it was down to Osaka for two nights of interviews and a Sunday observing the military drill training for the Kansai division of a very large rightist group based in Tokyo. It was a great opportunity to use the 18-200mm to its full potential, and unexpectedly became the last--I sold the lens to a guy headed off on a safari a couple days back in Shibuya (um, the safari = Africa, the sale = Shibuya). I'd really like a fish-eye (10.5mmDX) but a more likely scenario is financing the additional Hokkaido trip.... or sending back more boxes of the books and magazines I've accumulated over the past 16 months.

Ah! The photographer story---
A photo I took a few weeks back caught the eye of someone writing an article for the Japan TImes on bicycle customization trends. I ended up supplying four photos which were published back on June 8th in the Sunday edition in full color no less. I am supposedly going to receive payment for them....so I guess I am edging closer to professional photographer status. My Fulbright runs out at the end of July, so perhaps I better step up that side of things! The fun part of the story is that while I did ask permission before taking the shot, I didn't have the rider's contact info. After the request came in, I went into a bike shop dragnet with a print out of the shot and my contact info, hoping to find the mystery girl. The Tokyo bike scene is small. I found her in about an hour, and it turned out she's in a relationship with someone I already knew independently. Okay, so if the grad student thing doesn't work out I can try for ultra-limited-range photographer or easy-projects-only detective.

The article is still available on the Japan Times site here:
"In the Land of the Pimped Push Bikes" By Lee Brown.

Add to that a bouquet of over-long interviews (one last week was 2:30pm to 2am!)(transcription be damned!), a Ryan-on-the-futon interlude (twas fun having a housemate!), and all the nonsense I am up to, June was a busy busy month. But what's to come!?

I am off to Hokkaido for various pre-G8 Summitry Friday-Monday, and then continuing the break-neck interview pace. Daniel arrives mid-month for a couple weeks, Ami has a birthday coming up that may call for a trip to the countryside, and then we are in August. Already up are two Dudman shows, a trip to Kyoto for a big rally and more interviews, and the parade of a-bomb and war anniversaries. Ahhh......the countdown begins.

And I need an apartment in New Haven!!!

おまけにbicycle:

xo xo