Itou and Shoko -- This is the part of the evening where my eyeballs swell to the size of grapefruits!@.@ ...um, because the bassist was... really good...? ¬_¬
Wages of Sin
Tuesday 04/23
now playing:
Dir en grey
Jessica
&
Velze Dieulawahl
[unknown kanji title]
daily slang:
Yakimochi yakuna-yo!
"Don't be jealous!"
It's a cloudy day in Ikebukuro; i get there around 5pm. As per recent amendments to sections 4b and 4c of the Jrocknyc Legal Code, I rush to Disc Wave, the best visual kei store on the planet.
After an hour, I leave with a eight CDs and 2 DVDs, and only injure one other shopper! I tried to pull out a precariously-shelved La' Mule box set, and caused a landslide of boxes, and unfortunately, some poor little visual kei boi was kneeling below me checking out the CDs on a low shelf, and as I saw piles shift past the point of no return, I squeaked "tasukete!" but it wasn't in time; he looked up at me as the first of a dozen different-sized boxes crashed upon him. Valiantly, he tried to fight them off, and got one arm up, but he still fell backward on his ass. His friends (pink and blond-haired ones) all laughed, and he laughed too, so it turned out to be pretty funny, but even so I apologized a lot; but it was pretty funny -- even the salesgirl who came dashing over (and who I think had stacked the items so poorly in the first place, damn her!) was smiling about it. Welcome to another action-packed day in Go-Land!
After that, I still had a good hour to kill before meeting Bryan, so it was off to Disk Union where I ACCOMPLISHED THE IMPOSSIBLE and then to Recofan for a few more items. More details tomorrow. (Because even after what was probably my most successful shopping day ever -- lots of risks and no duds, and lots of stuff I've been wanting, finally found, cheaply -- I met up with Bryan as planned for the "Waseda Music Circle concert thing" he'd told me about a while ago, and it was EVEN BETTER.)
Chaos! -- "Caught in a mosh!"
The backstory is that at Waseda -- which is one of the old Japanese universities, and one of the most popular (I kinda imagine it as Japan's N.Y.U.) -- has a lot of student clubs, or circles, and one of those is a music circle. Every few months they meet and form temporary bands and do cover songs, and then perform live, mostly for others in the circle (30 or so people, it looked like) plus whomever else shows up (like me). This month they had Sepultura, Metallica, Arch Enemy, Mister Children, Spitz, Chage & Aska, Love Psychedelico, and other cover bands (aka copy bands).
Bry meets me at the station at 8:30 and puts me on the phone with his GF, who's not coming, and then after she hangs up he tells me (we're walking to the place now) "It started at 4:30." Since poking out his eyes with scissors would be counterproductive, I just say, "Oh well," and we get to Live Inn Rosa, head down the stairs, and I'm surprised at how big the place is; it's reminiscent of the area surrounding a high school auditorium or gymnasium in a way, with long halls, small lockers, wide staircases and all that.
We head in and there's a band playing, and the song is In Flames', one toward the back of Colony I think, and the solo is going on so I'm watching that, then the singer starts singing and he's cool, but then i realize it's a she. And then I realize she's hot! But she barks the song really well, just as well as a big, sweaty Gothenburger guy would! (Which -is- a compliment, I think!)
Kameyama -- Fast as hell!
And the band charges through a few more killer songs, mostly Arch Enemy stuff (I think -- my Arch Enemy files are a bit thin). The other guitarist solos, and he's playing a really nice King V, almost just like Monsieur Mustaine of the now-defunct Megadeth. A mosh pit starts up, subsides, starts up again even frenzied-er, and that's another first for me in Japan (the presence of a true mosh pit, not a visual/lolita fling-fling session).
It's a great ride, moreso because everyone on stage knows everyone in the audience, they're all friends, so it's just a fun, relaxing time.
Satou -- Flying! V!
Bryan intro's me to a few people, and I meet a few more on my own (it's easy -- everyone's in metal t-shirts, so all you have to do is go, "Children of Bodom!" and point at their t-shirt and voila, instant conversation. Like Hambuger Helper for shyness!)
After the Arch Enemy copy band, a copy band called Char comes on stage... the guitarist dressed like Char (I guess, having ne'er heard of such a band/musician), complete with a black wig. The leader of the circle sits in on keyboards. Char's cool, but aggression-less, and I like my music to be cathartic, so... moving on!
After that I meet a few more people -- and most of them know some English, so my brain (already beer-addled -- did I mention buying beer?) doesn't have to work too hard.
After a quick speech by the circle leaders (lots of arigatou's and otsukaresama deshita's to the bands, audience and club staff), the mob heads out the door, izakaya-bound. I spot the Arch Enemy vocalist and go up to her. "You coming drinking?" / "I'm thinking about it." / "Aw, please come, I'll but you a beer!" / "Okay!" My brain does a mental Triple-Lindy. Yay! That never works!
A thousand of us pile into the elevator (guitars, keyboards, amps, people, it's like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure meets The Monkees with all of us crammed in).
Then at the izakaya (a Shirokiya again, of course... are they publicly traded? Time to buy some of their stock!) we take over four tables -- an entire room -- and we do the nomihodai thing. (Vocabulary test time: nomi means what? And hodai means what? C'mon, I've told you this before... If you said drink and unlimited, you win: please send $500 to collect your prize!)
Crowd Control -- "Heavy Metal Shout!"
The Arch Enemy singer, whose name turns out to be Shoko, lived in America for a few years, so her English is good, and it's easy to talk. Gradually other people join us and the table discussion slides to visual, and especially X Japan (no thanks to my Hide keychain), and Masaaki (the King V guitarist, who has the Rude Awakening discs with him, he says they're not so good; personally I'm holding out for the DVD) and Yukihiro (who's got a ticket for Angra/Sinergy in June) are both X fans, and we start talking more and more about all sorts of stuff. And the beers just keep coming! And people from other tables come over to visit -- another kei fan, Maki, is supposed to be a good singer in her own right, I'm told -- but most of the evening is a blur now. But I do know I met a lot of cool people and had an exceptionally cool time. Lots of new email addys too. And none of that higher rank / lower rank b.s. that bedevils the usual band / fan uchiage, because the bands here aren't working bands, they're just hobbies for fun, at least until the performers get their degrees in Macroeconomics or Art History. ^.^
Then this morning I wake up with a hangover, because even though I knew I shoulda drank lots of water to replenish the bonded oxygen molecules in me' brain, I didn't. As a cure, I go in search of a ramen shop. Because that's where food is. But they're all closed because it isn't even 10am. The sun hurts my eyes, and my sense of balance is failing me, and I must smell like a burning Russian cigarette factory that firefighters tried to douse with stale beer.
Eventually I discover a Denny's (perfect!), and after a good ol' fashioned artery-cloggin' breakfast, I am magically healed, a little, barely. And all I can think is, Can't wait til' the next one!!! (I'm crossing my fingers for some Children of Bodom, Death, or, the ultimate dream, Megadeth's Rust in Peace straight through from beginning to end. Hoowah.)
Metal Up Your Ass! -- The future of the country drinks up. :)
"No matter how many times an AT&T technician comes out to the house, the static always comes back. The technicians can replace sections of the aging wire, fixing the static for a few weeks, but like rust or wrinkles, it always returns.
And, all six songs on the disc meet the expectations of coolness that come with an Exist Trace purchase, with the title track, "Vanguard," easily being the strongest.
Orleans no Shoujo" also has a lot going for it, hitting its stride in the chorus. But damitall if I wasn't disappointed overall.
"Requiem" has a diggable chorus line, slow and plaintive, but it doesn't push my buttons in any powerful way. "Rouge" I totally forgot about even before I was finished listening.
"Hana" almost makes it, with it's catchy & quick chorus but I feel like the musical themes weren't fully explored. The overlapping vocal on the very very end was a nice little treat though.
"Lost in Helix" is dirge-like in its plodding, and layered, but goes nowhere. I kinda think I see what they were aiming for with the chords in the chorus but the effect, that clicking-into-place that lets the simple transcend into the special, isn't there.
So 
Also cool, instead of just teh CD and DVD versions, there's a T-shirt version. T-shirts are going to save musicians.
On a very basic level, judging people by appearance means putting them quickly into impersonal categories, much like deciding whether an animal is a dog or a cat. “Stereotypes are seen as a necessary mechanism for making sense of information,” said David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University. “If we look at a chair, we can categorize it quickly even though there are many different kinds of chairs out there.”
“She tried to be chipper, and when they asked her age, she did this little shimmy,” as though she assumed that on such programs “you’re supposed to be kind of sexy and personable, and she got it wrong,” Mr. Berreby said. “Nothing sort of triggers our contempt more than something trying to be acceptable and then failing.” 
Like many new releases, Metallica’s latest album “Death Magnetic” was uploaded to the popular file hosting service Rapidshare one day prior to its official release date last year. Since users don’t broadcast their IP-address or distribute files to the public directly though Rapidshare, it came as a surprise when the police raided the house of an uploader a few weeks ago.
At first it was unclear how the identity of the uploader was revealed, but today German news outlet Gulli said it had found out that this was likely to be accomplished by creative use of paragraph 101 of German copyright law.
