A while ago now, friends Haru and Yoshi came over and helped me make sushi. I took advantage of a holiday to run around the city gathering ingredients and equipment. At Kam Man Food Products in Chinatown I got a carbon steel sashimi knife--not left handed unfortunately, but I figure it'll be like playing guitar. At Katagiri on east 59th Street, I got just about everything else, including tuna, salmon, and tobiko.

Here are the pictures Haru took, with his own captions.

Jay slices salmon cleverly even though he is the first time.
hajimetenanoni Jay san wa kiyouni salmon wo kiru.

His teacher, Yoshi is very severe!
kareno sensei, Yoshi wa totemo kibishii!

Haru is not on this photo because he shoots it
Haru ga satueishitanode kare wa kokoniwa inai.

and here's a closeup of the good stuff, including a fancy cucumber cut I learned from a book, indicated by the arrow:

and here's Haru:

I've been indulging my inexplicable hunger for well-written journals of Americans' time spent in Japan, previously satisfied mostly by the now-defunct Kind of Crap, Tokyo Damage Report, and sometimes Jean Snow, who has a huge talent for talking about things that it seems I should care about, but don't, at all...by reading an actual book, Donald Richie's "The Japan Journals 1947-2004." Yes, it wasn't enough to read through the entirety of Galvin Chow's rantings until I caught up and could read them in real time, now I need nearly 50 years of entries to satisfy me.

For some background, Richie has written tons of books about Japan, many partly autobiographical, and others about Japanese film and culture. He's a great observer and kind of a godfather to all the current American japan-bloggers.

In the traditional sense Richie's stuff is written far more elegantly than almost any blog I've seen. It's hard to know how much of this is the result of self-editing and how much is due to the inherent eloquence that people seem to have had back in the day. His examinations of the characters around him seem incredibly perceptive and can be brutal--he takes down several of the celebrities who started coming to him for tours after he became well-known, particularly Truman Capote, who comes off as completely childish, closed-minded and pretentious within a page or two. Sometimes his style becomes rather infuriating, as when he engages in poetics to describe how a pie brought to him by a friend reflected her personality:

"Mayumi has made and brought a pie. She did not want the pie to be sweet and so she made it, not sour, but non-sweet. I have never seen a pie that looked so much like a pie and yet had so much difference about it. It crumbled at once, like a fragile work of art, dissolved into crumbs, and it did not taste like a pie at all. It had all the appearance of itself, and yet it was something else. Just like her."

Good lord, it's just a bad pie! I find it very amusing, though, to imagine these words coming off the pages of Kind of Crap.

Sometimes Richie does a pretty amazing job of bringing to life parts of Japanese history and culture that I'm only beginning to know about, such as when he gets to watch Kurosawa and Mifune film a scene for "Drunken Angel" or hang out with Yukio Mishima.

Other times my prevailing reaction is wonder that people actually live like this. On the positive side I mean constantly hobnobbing with legends like Kurosawa, Mishima, Philip Johnson, Yasujiro Ozu, and Nagisa Oshima, and countless other names I don't recognize, but who are presented as TV or film stars, or preeminent scholars or writers. On the negative side, Richie seems to have a sexual relationship with almost everyone he knows, both men and women (but mostly men), many of them married or otherwise romantically linked. He lets these details slip in slowly, but eventually I started to just expect it. It produces in me a strange combination of jealousy and doubt that a life like that can ever be happy or free.

If anyone else is thinking of reading this, I'll also warn you of Richie's policy of not repeating any passages that have previously been published. This means that many pieces of these journals have actually been left out, despite the completist presentation. I understand the integrity behind not selling people the same thing twice, but it seems just as bad in a way to make me buy most or all of his books to get the whole story, and wonder if what's contained herein is not in fact mostly leftovers. But it is nevertheless a good read.

Continuing with "The Japan Journals 1947-2004," I start to wonder if I should be recording more of the events of my life, but don't want to turn this into a simple journal, and am far too lazy to start up a separate journal, having enough trouble keeping this up as it is. Herein, a dump of the past couple weeks, hopefully not too tedious.

First, is it just me or are there some annoyingly widespread trends in movie titles? I'll accept Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, but then you've got After the Sunset, Before Night Falls, Between Sunset and the Dusk Before Sunrise, After the time Before the Sun...I'm also bothered by the temporal proximity of "Beyond the Sea" and "The Sea Inside," both terrible titles in their own right. I'm ready to blame Javier Bardem for all this.

The newly incarnated "the zero effect" played its first shows on the 15th, 16th, and 21st of this month. It was Zach's idea to use that name again, and I won't be defending its merits in any more arguments. We decided that to make the process of starting to perform easier on us, we would not go the route of a venue. Instead we played in my living room. This gave us the chance to do a lot of preparation of the space ahead of time, and hook up as many devices as we wanted without worrying about other bands and time slots. It also ensured that only friends and friends of friends would see the show, but for our debut, that seemed an acceptable limitation. At some point I came up with the conceit that this would be the first in a series of shows in places other than usual music venues, and that we'd ask people who saw the shows to come up with other ideas for future shows, for example in places where they live or work or otherwise frequent and have access to. We ended up with a couple of ideas but not quite what I had hoped for, so if any readers have anything, please leave a comment. We'll play just about anywhere.

Anyway, this show we called "darkroom," and we made the living room very very dark by using fabric to close it off from all light sources. Then we made some DIY spotlights with very focused beams and some blue and red gels, to show only on our faces when we played. We did 12 songs, with 5 of them serving more as interludes, chances for us to do more experimental stuff and give people's minds a break from the somewhat dense content of the songs. I printed up programs giving the song titles and information about the concert series thing, on fancy textured art paper, though I was advised that no one could read them in the darkness. Our 3rd member, Shayna, didn't have much time to practice for this show, so we sort of exploited that by having her make a dramatic entrance halfway through and then play on the last 4 songs. The entrance consisted of her being secreted away in the adjacent bedroom until the appointed time, when she started pounding her floor tom and then marched slowly into the living room with it. The other 'special' thing we did was an interlude called "the conversation," which I don't want to give away entirely because we may want to do it again, but if you're familar with the source of the title you can probably guess at the general nature of it.

The intended effect of the darkness and everything else was both to confuse people and to force them to focus on the sound at the exclusion of any other sensory input (except taste, for the jerks who were munching on tortilla chips). But as we should have expected, many had no trouble figuring out and even anticipating our subterfuges, while others were confused in ways we couldn't possibly have planned. Some people had little idea who was in the band afterward. Others had trouble telling whether some of the interludes were produced intentionally or were merely the sound of our equipment malfunctioning and me trying to fix it. One person whom I hadn't met before simply stared at me blankly for a good 15 minutes while I chatted with a coworker, seeming to want to say "What...what?!?!"

At the end of it all I was pretty exhausted, physically, mentally and musically (I got some food poisoning the night before the last show and was up the entire night vomiting and locked in a loop of thought, but that's another story). I'm proud to say that this was probably the best show I've ever done with a band in terms of pure quality of performance, though it was by no shortcut, only an extended period of writing and rehearsing that we may not be able to repeat. If anyone wants mp3s let me know.