Month: June 2005

Osaka Taxi

Just remembered this from Sunday: Four of us got in a cab and headed toward the Hankyu department store to grab a bite on one of the upper floors, before the whole thing gets redone later this year. The cab driver was female. This was only the second time I’ve ever seen a female driver, and we all had fun asking her about the taxi business from her perspective, etc. We had one of those “friendly repoire with the cabbie” things going pretty well; in all, a very cool experience. I guess I got a bit too into the whole thing, though.
The question of why all cabbies, independents and company employees alike, have to wear black (or dark blue) was posed; our driver did not know. Then, as we passed a line of people dressed in black standing at a bus stop, someone from the back seat wondered out loud why they were all dressed that way (they were dressed a bit strange, kind of an Elderly Kansai Goth type of look). Someone offered the obvious, saying “funeral,” but I tried my luck with “because they’re all cabbies.”
The car became instantly silent, and the driver’s eyes visibly bulged out of her head as she bit her tongue.
In retrospect, I may have been lucky that she didn’t slam on the brakes, punch me in the mouth, and throw us out of the car right there. She was that pissed.
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Been in this country more than a decade; still haven’t lost the touch, I guess.

My Ainu Roots

A while back, somebody explaining my family ancestry told me that I’m part Ainu. Which is funny, because when I first met my fiance’s dad, he said I looked part Ainu, and I thought he was crazy (I may have Russian sailor blood in me, as evidenced by the occasional rogue bright orange hair on my face, but Ainu?). It turns out that he was right (actually no real surprise since he taught anthropology at Mahasarakham University for a few decades – as usual, I turned out to be the dumbass).
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I like how the Wikipedia entry states that men eat with chopsticks, and women eat with wooden spoons. Do Ainu women usually choose the “soup” entree instead of the “salad” (as opposed to their counterparts in most other areas of the world)? And how the hell do any of them dig into, say, roasted wolf shanks, or a boiled badger steak?
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I’m not religious, but I find animism to be really cool sometimes, especially among the all the current day bullshit caused by religious intolerance. Give me a fire-worshipping, wine-sipping, animal-head-sacrificing pagan any goddamn day.
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Can the person who orginally told me I’m Ainu please stand up? I can’t remember who it was, but it was almost definitely my mom.

Club Sazae Umeda

Through a fiendish twist of events involving Air France stewardesses and fresh squeezed lemon chu-hi, I found myself at a club in Umeda on Saturday night, actually their opening weekend. Basically, the whole experience made me remember why I stopped going to clubs:
– I’m too old for that shit
– Shitty music played by the wannabe rockstar Djs; from the sound of it, you would never guess that house music has actually progressed in the last ten years
– The “fog of war,” cigarette smoke so thick you have to light your own to make it bearable
– Insufferable wannabe yakuza penislickers who insist on staring down everyone that has the gall to walk by their group; strategically positioned next to the restrooms, of course
– New laser/LED lightshows with New! Improved! Dazzle! guaranteed to cause at least a few seizures in the pit every night
– Old women showing sagging tit
– Antibeer: Beer that is the antithesis of cheap, cold, and very un-urinish in taste and appearance
I just have to repeat how truly awful the music was: It was shit, shit, shit. If you were the DJ working CLUB SAZAE this past Saturday, please know that even a retarded chimpanzee could have mixed your Best of Ibiza CD collection better (and yes, I know you were mixing CDs on a shit setup because I heard the track flutter during your fagalicious “fade ‘n cues”).

Star Wars Analysis by Neal Stephenson

Over at the NY Times: Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out

The first “Star Wars” movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs – the purest kind of vegging-out material – to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle.
All such content – as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes – was banished in the first of the prequels (“Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” 1999). In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don’t even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture.

There’s something about this article that got me thinking about the Metaverse from Stephenson’s classic, Snow Crash. About how Julia became more famous than the rest of the programming team because she worked on the faces of the avatars inhabiting the Metaverse, to which peopled turned out paying most attention.
Or the way the barons of bandwidth and media controlled the seething masses… It’s happening right before your eyes, at this very moment! Run away!