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Tokyo: Smoke Break

Back from Tokyo, and it was awesome! Unfortunately, immediately upon returning I have been catapulted into a work shitpit, so I can't do much updating at the moment. In the meantime, maybe you might enjoy chilling with my Harajuku girl while waiting. I'm printing her out and sticking her to my wall at work this week to remind myself (a) that I was just on holiday, and (b) to breathe.

King Rat: Needs A Remix

Oh dear, my naffness premonition about King Rat turned out to be right. Check out these lines:

• "Saul's heart was beating like a Jungle bassline." [This is after Saul had been running for ages. Fuck saving the metropolis, dude has some serious irregular heartbeat issues to worry about! You want to exaggerate like this, say his heart was beating like Moby's Thousand, but a jungle bassline is just...medically wrong.]
• "The rats and Saul left the relative safety of London's nightlands and entered the warehouse, the frenzied jaws of Drum and Bass, the domain of smoke and strobe lights and Hardcore, the Piper's lair, the heart of Darkness, deep in the Jungle." [Again with the unnecessary capitalisations. Are we in Brixton or the Hundred Acre Wood?]
• "The Drum and Bass felt as if it would lift the hatch out of the floor, off into the sky. It was unforgiving, a punishing assault of original Hardcore beats." [It feels a bit off to use that usual MC patois of "original hardcore" in a description like this. Is it just me?]
• "She pulled the record back, let it forward again a little, pulled it back, scratching playfully like an old school rapper, finally releasing her hand and switching off the first tune in a smooth movement, unleashing the new bassline." [Scratching like a rapper? Also, reading about how someone DJs is like watching paint dry.]

Apart from the drum'n'bass cringeworthiness, some other things about the book's plot seem a bit misconceived, sort of like what you might come up with if you went out to a massive jungle night with your mates back in the day, took a lot of E, brought everyone back to yours to come down on some spliffs, and while lounging wrecked on your plonk-stained student flat carpet, started brainstorming ideas for a book. For example (some spoilers to follow, but I think they're so damn obvious long before they happen that there's no harm giving them away now):

• Saul the protagonist finds out as a young man that he is actually a rat. He is told this by King Rat, also a rat. He encounters Anansi, the king of spiders, and Loplop, king of birds. But at no point do any of these characters appear in any form other than human. I think it's totally acceptable for them to be able to take on forms other than their own species, but it's rather odd they always seem to prefer being human. Love the skin you're in, man. Or carapace.
• A minor character in the book is a police detective whose name is Crowley. Aha, the reader thinks, giving him a name so obviously allusive means I should keep my eye on this one! Actually, no. Apart from investigating all the grotesque murders perpetrated by the Piper, he's just a honest ordinary policeman trying to do his job. Most pointless red herring ever.
• The premise of the book is that, as hinted at in the children's story, the Pied Piper of Hamlin is totally eeeeevil and gets a real buzz from mesmerizing hapless creatures with his flute playing and making them dance to his dastardly tune. He doesn't seem to reap real world benefits from this like sex slaves or anything, he just likes the control. And he really really wants to kill Saul, because Saul is a rat-human hybrid and isn't affected by the sound of his flute. No, there isn't any more to it than that. So anyway, an easy way for him to kill Saul is to lure him somewhere crowded, then play his flute and command the mesmerized humans to kill Saul. But clearly that would be too easy for our villain! Instead, he actually has to persuade a dnb producer/DJ to let him play flute on a track, lure Saul to a massive jungle night, and force the DJ to drop the track. You know that sound of a record sputtering to a sudden halt? I'm making it right now. I mean, come on. Okay, so Mieville loves jungle. I love jungle too, but you don't see me finding nonsensical ways to include it in my joint venture agreements.

King Rat (China Miéville)

I decided it was about time I read some China Miéville (although he's a notable writer in his own right, I must admit the main draw for me was that he's said the Borribles trilogy is one of his biggest influences) so I went looking in the library shelves. I know Perdido Street Station is his most celebrated work, but when I read the blurb on the back of King Rat it was clear I had to start with that instead:

Something is stirring in London's dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul's father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.

But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into his prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat.

In the night-land behind London's facade, in sewers and slums and rotting dead spaces, Saul must learn his true nature.

Grotesque murders rock the city like a curse. Mysterious forces prepare for a showdown. With Drum and Bass pounding the backstreets, Saul confronts his bizarre inheritance - in the badlands of South London, in the heart of darkness, at the gathering of the Junglist Massive.

Like the DJ says: 'Time for the Badman.'

Longest 12 Hours Ever

We watched the 11.35 pm screening of Sweeney Todd last night. My appreciation of the second half of the movie was somewhat affected by a little hungry voice in my head going "pie pie pie pie want pie want pie pie pie pie want want want" continuously. This morning, Alec was running errands nearby and phoned me once he was done to ask what he could buy me for lunch. There was only one answer.

Gorilla Marketing

Ads like this really make me miss watching TV in the UK. Gorilla and Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight have a moment, and very tangentially, Cadbury tries to sell some chocolates. (Via Mayee.)

Must Not Moon Yasukuni

Japan has never been high on my list of places to travel to, mostly because nothing I've ever seen or heard about it has ever really appealed to me. Everything I've seen of its cities in the movies looks dystopic and ugly and makes me want to hide in a corner, and the bizarro Japanese quirks that seem to fascinate the rest of the world usually just annoy me. I also have a larger political problem with Japan's shifty stance on its wartime atrocities, which is probably the main reason my feelings about Japan have always been decidedly chilly.

And yet, I am going to Tokyo next week. Never underestimate the ability of a free hotel stay to triumph over my principles!

Alec's there on work, so I'll be exploring on my own the vast majority of our time there. If anyone has tips about how a non-Japanese speaker with a decent but not excellent sense of direction can best enjoy exploring Tokyo (and nearby places like Nikko, Kamakura or Hakone) alone in the depths of winter, please share. I've done a fair bit of reading up, but I'd be especially interested in hearing about any particular places, activities or meals that people found especially memorable, or anything that people would not recommend. So far, my plan A is to do totally cool edgy shit, transcending language and cultural barriers and finding a new enlightened understanding of this nation I have so long disdained. My plan B is to spend 7 days in Daiso, which would also be bliss.

Words Of Mutilation

I've always pipe-dreamed about making some foray into freelance music writing, but I usually bring myself quickly back to reality by reminding myself that good music writing is damn difficult. I'm rarely satisfied with any of the writing I do here to begin with, and that's already about music that stands out to me. So I worry that if I had to churn out something about music I was indifferent to, simply because I was getting paid to do it, the end product would be dismal.

I really hope the same reasons were at play for some of the bad writing I'm about to "showcase" - a rather bitchy thing to do, I know, but what are blogs for if not for occasionally venting the impotent fury that would bemuse and bore everyone else around you?

From Juice magazine, I'm not sure which edition (I photographed the offending text and threw away the rest), Pavan Shamdasani reviews a Pixies tribute album. Here's the full text of the review:

"This is odd. There's a considerable chance that you've never heard of The Pixies. They were never a mainstream band, and most of their popularity appeared years after their break-up, when Kurt Cobain admitted to ripping off their stop/start dynamics. So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. And even stranger are the cover choices - a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on "Gigantic"? A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad "Hey"? A Mogwai noisefest on "Gouge Away"? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in "Where Is My Mind?" OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special."

• There's a considerable chance that you've never heard of The Pixies. Way to start off a review, dude - with a big dose of condescension for your readers!
• ...most of their popularity appeared... Popularity does not "appear" fully formed from Zeus's head, it is "gained" or "garnered".
• So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. Where do I even begin? 1) Ferry disasters have casualties. Bands do not. 2) A huge number of tribute albums are made for people who are live and kicking. Google this if you need proof. 3) It is either misleading or ignorant to describe a band who broke up acrimoniously in 1993 and didn't reform until 2004 as "still touring up till last year". 4) The act of putting out an album cannot be described as a strange "occurrence". It may be a strange "move" or an odd "decision", but it is not an "occurrence".
• And even stranger are the cover choices - a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on "Gigantic"? Because male emo singers aren't allowed to enjoy big black cocks, clearly.
• A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad "Hey"? A Mogwai noisefest on "Gouge Away"? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in "Where Is My Mind?" OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special. What's so self-evidently wrong with any of the cover choices described? Why do they pay little tribute to what made The Pixies so special? And given that the writer starts off the review by assuming most of his readers don't even know the band, how on earth are they now supposed to understand this conclusion if he doesn't throw them any frickin' bone machines?