Friday, February 23rd - The Emperor's Birthday Public Holiday
I managed almost an extra hour of sleep this morning, and woke to greet the cold twilight world just past 6:00 am, as opposed to my usual 4:45 jump on the alarm. While this fell a wee bit short of the glorious 8:30 am lie-in I'd hoped for, it was still a 'win' in moderate terms. An hour's extra sleep is kind of a big deal in these precincts.
After enjoying a middling interlude taking care of some pre-dawn fecal business, I set about pulling the previous afternoon's laundry off the row of hangers on the laundry pole we have running across half the living room (we usually hang everything out on the balcony, but when it's cold or inclement, nothing actually dries). The ensuing folding, sorting and stowing business usually takes ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the volume of the previous day's wash. Today's session was a fifteen minute-plus affair. The volume of soiled towels and garments is always just a bit higher on national holidays, it seems.
This is typically when I catch up on all the latest shit being shoveled by the 24-7 western news media machine. Before we got the new TV, I'd just turn on the cable tuner and run BBC World News or CNN until Mina woke up, at which point we'd switch over to the pap peddlers on the local morning news variety show.
About six months ago the fibre-optic cable tuner we were leasing from our provider started to fuck up. I guess we'd been running it for 10 years or so, and nothing lasts forever. These days, decade-old tech is considered 'antique'. My four year old iPad is already on the cusp of becoming obsolete.
In any case, Mina called the service hotline and gave them the skinny on our situation, and they sent us a new one, along with instructions on how to pack up and send back the old model. We've done this before, and as I recall, it was pretty easy to get the new one up and running ten years ago. Apparently the evil deities that govern problematic 21st century tech had other things in store for us this time. What was supposed to be a ten minute job soon became an epic undertaking. We ended up wasting a whole evening fucking around with it, and it just wouldn't connect. We'd get halfway through the process, then it would suddenly go tits up and stop co-operating.
The tech advisor on the helpline finally posited that, "...it might have something to do with your router needing to be reset", which would entail paying to get someone 'in the know' over here to deal with it, and blah, blah, blah. Another wad of cash into the wind.
Of course, I could attempt to navigate the process myself...but that would risk throwing our whole delicately balanced Wi-Fi eco-system into the proverbial shitter.
Nah.
At that point, I just kind of gave up. I guess I suddenly came to the stark realization that the only things I really still watched on the old cable set-up were the BBC, CNN and pointless re-runs of Ancient Aliens, which I mostly napped through. Hardly worth ¥3000 a month. Like a lot of people, for the last four or five years we've been streaming almost everything we watch. After a quick discussion, we decided to pull the plug on our long running monthly subscription, pack up the new AND old decoder set-ups, and send them BOTH back.
Within the week, Kuro Neko (parcel delivery) came by and collected them, and we were done.
I'd been subscribing to one satellite/cable service or another for the better part of thirty years. To be honest, it was nothing short of liberating to finally cancel. There was a time that access to cable was a real lifeline connection to whatever was going on in the outside world. A thin tether to sanity, if you will (yes...Japanese TV is really that bad) in those heady pre-millennium days before the internet really took off in these parts.
Moving forward, the dilemma was then how to go about getting my daily dose of English language junk news for clothes folding time...
I did a deep dive into our semi-new-fangled smart TV's streaming app library, and after a bit of trial and error, came up with a reasonable and (most importantly) 'free' substitute. I honestly don't know why I hadn't thought of doing this earlier. I could have terminated that cable business five or six years ago, when we got our first Firestick, and saved almost four grand.
Oops.
I've since been sourcing all of my BGM English language junk news from the Haystack News app (free), which non-stop streams an amalgam of the most current drivel from a dozen or so 'major' news streaming services in a non-stop, but constantly updating loop. While they pepper a few commercials in here and there (usually the same one or two over and over again - like on Plex), it's mostly so called 'news', and from a wide enough range of sources that there isn't too much overlap or repetition. While it tends to be a bit more America-centric than I like, there are interesting counter balances from Reuters, Canada's CBC and Al Jazeera. They also pepper in junk items from FOX, and the new worst of the worst, the ultra-right wing shit flinging platform, Newsmax.
The downside? It can be more than a bit depressing. Anyone even casually paying attention will know that the world is an increasingly desperate and scary place. Unsurprisingly, humanity seems to be at the root of almost every pressing crisis. Most concerning to me is the sway 'Carbuncle America' and it's denizens have over almost everything. The sheer volume of cavalier stupidity I see coming out of that place is nothing short of astounding. With an election coming down, and only bad and worse on the menu, the future doesn't look too bright.
I can't remember a time when everything seemed so utterly fucking dark and hopeless.
Trump and Biden? Again?
We're fucking doomed.
In any case (mental health concerns aside), I suppose streaming Haystack handily beats the shit out of watching the same 45 minutes of stale content looped all day long on CNN or the BBC, which is what I was essentially paying our fibre-optic cable provider ¥40,000-plus a year for.
Times twelve months, that could almost pay for a trip out to Costco (more on that in a later dispatch).
Alas, I digress.
Despite the national holiday, Mina was up and about by 7:15 (having snagged a wee bit more sleep than yours truly), made short work of breakfast, then had a couple of loads of laundry done and hung up across the apartment before beating it out the door to Mayumi's just short of 9:30.
(Have I mentioned that on rainy days, our living space is eerily reminiscent of a 19th century Chinese laundry in the fabled 'Old West'?)
It's our last long weekend before the vernal equinox (March 20th), and no three day run of holidays in these precincts can pass without Mina having to 'pay penance', and hump it out to her sister's to service the Old Lady for as long as it takes to keep the peace with that loathsome crew. This can vary from a few hours, to an entire day, depending on how venal her sister is feeling. Today's mission is (purportedly) to sort through Baba's rainbow assortment of pills for the next month, and organize them into 'daily dose' portions that can be taken easily, without confusion or question. This should take all of an hour, if the Old Lady is organized and feeling co-operative. Then there are the randoms...jobs they'll draft her in to doing - though there are four able bodied (?) adults in the house already. It seems the motivation is mostly to simply punish her for not having Baba over here two weekends a month.
Lord forbid she's even a moment late, either... lest she incur the wrath of her Champion of Mental Stability sister. I'm surprised Mayumi hasn't put a 'punch-in' time clock at the door, along with a bamboo switch to swat Mina's legs with if she's not punctual to the second.
In any case, it's another cold, rainy Vancouver-like day. With the notable exception of a freakishly pleasant Tuesday (it was sunny and got up to almost 22C), it's been raining on and off for most of the week. The flat, cold, plate-grey February sky is absolutely cheerless. Time positively drags watching the stubborn dregs of winter slowly circle the drain in these parts. I've always found this the most unpalatable time of year.
In a month, the sakura will be out, and all the foolishness that goes along with it will be afoot.
A few early blossoms have emerged here and there in the park and along the Horikawa, hastened by the short spate of mildish temperatures we've had over the last ten days or so. I only managed one proper run this week, though. The rain and wind have kept me in, pumping away on the magnetic spin bike. Halfway through my 45 minutes on that I'm about ready to stroke out. I usually manage between 21 and 22 km of partial hill-climbing before it times out.
Weather permitting, I prefer getting out and doing the canal course - though it takes a bit longer. It's less severe than the bike. Mina worries that she'll come home and find me stone cold dead on the linoleum floor beside that bike one day.
No pain, no gain, I guess?
Just short of noon, a Messenger notification just popped up. It seems Mina is on her way back. Mission apparently accomplished with no muss or fuss. I guess there was no family lunch on offer at 'Psycho House' today. A small win...though it's hard to say whether she was disappointed or not. If the crew over there were a bit nicer and more predictable, I'm sure her visits over there would be a positive thing.
Tuesday, March 5th
Another cold, dark, rainy ass day here in Losersville. Glad I don't have to venture out to teach today....the temperature's been pretty steady at 5 or 6C since before dawn this morning. Yesterday it was 13C at 2pm, but felt a lot colder due to a brutal north wind.. Around this time of year, we'll have a run of semi-mild days, then a few really shitty cold ones. In the late February/early March period of transition from winter to spring, the natives call this 'sankan shion', meaning 'three days cold, four days warm'. I suppose 'warm' could be kind of a stretch. I'd say 'less cold' and 'more cold'. In my estimation, the term 'warm' shouldn't really enter the conversation below 16 or 17C.
After the initial morning stuff, I did a bit of writing, a half hour stretching routine (I get terrible cramps if I don't do this), then 45 minutes on the spin bike just before noon. I managed to knock out 22km. I don't know that's anything exceptional, but I sweat buckets and felt thoroughly spent at the other end. Needless to say, when it's cold, it's more of a chore to get motivated. There's always this nagging little voice in my head saying, 'Fuck it...go back to bed', but I make a point of resisting.
I depend on music to get me through this part of the day in particular. Despite the breadth of choices available to stream, early in the day I have a tendency to plumb known commodities as opposed to actively seeking out new stuff. I guess that's 'lame' or whatever...but there's such a vast amount of stuff I've either owned and regretfully let go of at some point (or just never got around to checking out first time around) that there's never a shortage of things from my old legacy faves to suck me in while I'm up to my domestic business. Perhaps my recent 'delicate constitution' is a product of aging, but I tend to need something easy to metabolize in the morning.
Yesterday I did a deep dive into the Kinks back catalog to get me through the weekly house cleaning, specifically the excellent expanded remasters of Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (both of which I already own previous incarnations of on CD). The latest remasters sound great. The Kinks are one of the few bands I never really get tired of. Everything they did was top notch (except for maybe the last couple of albums, which I haven't actually got around to perusing yet...)
In light of today's grey and cold piss down, I started off with Wings. London Town. Recently I've been on a weird Wings kick, and this is one that I never really bothered with at all back in the day. It came out when I was in Grade 7, and despite having one big single, it gradually dithered on the charts, and became a staple in the record store dollar cut-out bins. Back in the day, this is where over-stocked, commercially disappointing albums went to die. They'd have their sleeve corners roughly hole punched and be unceremoniously relegated to discount bins towards the back of the store.
Times were changing, and by '78 or '79, the disco and dinosaur-rock eras were finally giving way to radio-friendly 'new wave' on the all-powerful Top 40 stations. As acts like Blondie, The Police and The Cars gradually started to edge out the more complacent 'old guard' on AM radio, a lot of veteran legacy acts struggled to re-invent themselves and stay relevant. This would lead to all kinds of awkward and sometimes hilarious career mis-steps from the established 'big names' as the 80's progressed.
Forty-some odd years later, there's an absolute treasure trove of cringey 'famous name' albums from this unfortunate period to go back and enjoy - if for nothing but their dated production and cheese nostalgia value. Once in awhile you'll hit poo-poo gold, and find one that you get addicted to. I usually don't stray too far from known quantities that I actually like...and from there, I'm able to mine some real stinkers.
Take Mick Jagger's second solo outing, 1987's Primitive Cool. I'd heard it in passing from a Japanese friend with questionable taste years and years ago, and didn't get why he'd even bother with it. Upon revisiting it decades later, my initial impression was largely the same - that it was a pretty fucking bad album. This where it gets weird. It was SO BAD that I felt oddly compelled to listen to it almost every day for the next month. The end result? I started to need it. I had to play the fucking thing every morning for weeks. Of course, it remained crap. Perhaps semi-redeemable crap...but crap nonetheless.
It's sort of like food. People will line up to eat shit that has no nutritional value, and may even contribute to their demise...but that doesn't stop them from stuffing their faces with it. Junk food can taste pretty good. It also provides the contrast that helps to remind us of how lovely actual GOOD FOOD really is.
Perhaps this is the great thing about streaming?
In any case, an over-looked late period Wings album seemed like just the thing for such a shitty, dour morning. In all of it's familiarity and blandness, London Town is kind of like the aural equivalent of a tepid bowl of plain mush. Positives? The album's one big single (With a Little Luck) definitely has a cheesy, late 70's nostalgia thing going for it, and the addition of the unlikely Celtic folk of Mull of Kintyre as a bonus track at the end kind of wraps the whole pablum affair up on an acceptable note. Negatives? The album is largely bland filler - lazy and self indulgent. The two aforementioned tracks can be had on a number of McCartney collections, making ownership of this particular record pretty much spurious. Forty six years after the fact, I figure this is a record that most casual listeners can pretty much do without.
Of course, I'll listen to it again. I'm weird like that. Occasionally I'll actually start really liking 'bad' albums on the third or fourth go round, then get addicted. I'm the same with movies and TV shows.
Next, I queued up The Who's Live at Shea Stadium, 1982. I've been a big fan since I was 15 or 16, but generally shunned anything post Keith Moon for years and years. This recently released double album was the topic of discussion on an FB fan group that popped up while I was scrolling through the latest threads yesterday, so I made a mental note to check it out. This was to be their final tour before retiring (for seven years), and they had The Clash with them as support (ironically, that would be the last proper Clash tour before guitarist Mick Jones left the band).
As far as the band's live offerings from that period, it's much better than the generally poor 'Who's Last' live album (which saw a posthumous release back in 1984, two years after the band had folded). I guess they had something to prove that night. Anyways, despite what seems to be a kind of muddy sounding mix, The Who turn in a pretty good performance (oddly, there's also a live recording of The Clash's opening set from the same night, and it sounds great).
The Who could draw a reasonable crowd back in their heyday.
Of course, it's Kenney Jones (Small Faces/Faces) on drums, not Moon (Keith had expired four or five years earlier), so there isn't the percussive bombast that the band had built a good part of its early reputation on, but the (now largely forgotten) later period John Entwistle penned material from their final two albums sounds pretty good live, and there are enough bright moments to make for an entertaining listen. Most importantly, it ably held my attention through 45 minutes of pumping away on semi-hill climbing mode. Recently it's been all 70's-era Bowie when I hit the bike, so an unheard live WHO album was a good change of pace.
Now what to listen to if it pisses down again tomorrow morning?
(I ended up streaming London Town again, then Roxy Music's Country Life as a pre-run palate cleanser. I think I'm going to curate a playlist of lame albums that I've somehow got hooked on over the years. I may even share the gory details in a later dispatch. Apparently there'll be no more pandering to the cool crowd for me. Heh.)
Friday, March 8th
Today marks exactly 30 years since I left Vancouver for good. I'd decided to follow after Mme Lord Vader, who'd come back to visit her parents over Christmas break, then had some kind of mysterious nervous breakdown on the cusp of catching her New Year's eve flight back to Vancouver, and refused to leave her families house. After waiting the situation out for a couple of months, I'd decided to wrap up my (surprisingly) successful English teaching business, give up our apartment, and buy a ticket back to Nagoya.
Of course my late Mum and Gramma told me it was a bad idea. They thought that it was time for me to stop chasing about back forth across the Pacific, and settle down. While I appreciated their concern, I simply couldn't let the situation with Ms. Vader go unresolved.
Of course, I had no idea what awaited me.
When I arrived in Nagoya just short of 11:00 am on the sunny, cold morning of Tuesday, March 8th, I got a three month tourist visa stamp in my passport. Ms. Vader and her father picked me up at the airport.
Within a week, I was back at the old post-war nagaya rooming house I'd stayed at for three months a couple of springs earlier, and scouting for private students.
Ms. Vader seemed alright. Truth be told, none of the doctors or specialists she'd seen could find anything wrong with her. Mystery of mysteries. After a month or so, she picked up a temp job working weekdays at the reception desk of a hospital close to the JR station near her parents house. I scraped together a few private classes by distributing fliers, and advertising on the community boards at the International Centre. I wasn't making much, but without a proper visa, I couldn't get anything legit.
In any case, it covered incidentals like, beer, ramen and what have you.
I reconnected with my local musician friends, and made several weekend jaunts back out to Osaka and Kyoto to hang out with the old Moriyama Building crew (a small gang of intrepid expats and J-locals I'd done a dangerous amount of carousing and drinking with on my first jaunt to the country almost five years earlier).
Time passed quickly.
Three months later, it was back to Vancouver on my return ticket...then a couple of weeks later, back across the pond yet again. Happily, Mme Lord Vader seemed well on her way to some semblance of her old self, though she insisted that she still had 'a ways to go', and returning to Vancouver apparently wasn't in the cards. This back and forth business was expensive, so things were going to need to be resolved one way or another.
As Japanese Immigration had told me there would be no more re-entry permits for a year after my June - September stamp expired, we resolved to go ahead and get married. This was well ahead of what we'd originally planned on. I don't think her parents were over the moon with the idea, seeing as I had neither gainful, steady employment, or wads of cash and financial security - not to mention that I also lacked any real Japanese language ability. Oh...then there was my 'gaijin-ness'. The elephant in the room, so to speak.
Despite all of this, her family were kind and welcoming. I will always have the fondest memories of the times I spent with them.
Being the youngest of three sisters, Mme Lord Vader had a knack for getting whatever she wanted, and her parents ultimately had to suck it up and let her do as she pleased. While we were pretty much on our own as far as supporting ourselves (being adults, of course), her father was generous, and bought us some furniture and a nice TV when we moved in to our fateful second place. I still have the dining room table and chairs to this day. Needless to say, I got nothing from my family in Canada, or estranged father in California. I think my Gramma might have offered to pay half for one of my tickets out to visit. I can't remember if I asked my father for anything or not. I seem to recall that he may have sent a few hundred dollars one Christmas. We were living in our first place...a one room (One K) bachelor suite in Kurokawa. It must have been 1995. In any case, he typically seemed to derive some amount of pleasure from watching me struggle and fail.
Fair enough, I suppose.
I guess the deal with Vader's parents was that if we wanted to do this, we'd be doing it almost entirely on our own steam. It was the same when she'd blown off going to Japanese university a few years earlier, and decided that she wanted to study in Canada. She could do what she wanted, but as for any financial help, she'd be on her own.
As far as I know, she ended up paying for that entire venture with money she'd saved up working nights as a bar hostess for a couple of years.
We slogged it out as best we could until the spring of 1997, when things went irreparably south and started to fall apart.
For my part, I think I'd been spending too much time chasing around the music scene with my rock star pals, while she'd re-acclimatized to life in Japan, and found herself in a different social and peer group at her workplace. In short, we were on different trajectories. Late that autumn she moved out, leaving me in the two bedroom 'mansion' in Kita-ku we'd taken over from her older sister less than a year earlier, as she got her own bachelorette digs not too far from where I'm living now.
From then on we would remain in touch periodically over matters of business or necessity, while our ill-fated marriage would persist (on paper, at least) until I acquired permanent residence almost a decade later.
In the interim, I met The Korea girl. She was a firecracker...brilliant and talented. Enter close to 5 years of high drama, travel, laughter and tears. Ultimately, the fates carried her back to her point of origin.
Through it all, I'd continue on in that Kita-ku mansion, until finally getting served an eviction notice from the building management company at the end of October, 2003. At that point, it was just me. With the constant commotion and ever changing cast of 'international' characters coming and going since I'd been left to my own devices, I'm surprised that they tolerated me in there for that long.
Mr. Hitchcock gesturing at a facsimile of my previous residence, 'Hi-Life Ozone'. I lived on the 2nd floor.
With uncertainty suddenly staring me dead in the face, Mme Lord Vader and her late father came to the rescue. I suppose she took some responsibility for the unfortunate predicament I'd gradually found myself in, though in all fairness, it was a hole that I'd largely dug for myself.
They arranged for movers, dealt with the angry natives I'd be leaving in my wake, and helped me to secure a new address...which is where Mina and I continue to live to this very day.
Over three decades, it's been a mixed bag. Dizzying heights. Bottomless pits. Loss and redemption.
Regrets?
Of course. While that whole sobbing over what is and might have been exercise is pretty pointless, I do wish I'd made a few more visits back to Vancouver when Mum and Gramma were alive, and the old family house was still there...at least before everyone I knew had left or died, and the city I grew up in was still at least a vague shadow of itself.
I also wish I'd been a lot smarter with the whole music business misadventure...and perhaps a bit more careful of who I considered 'friends', and placed trust in. While I did have some amazing experiences, things wound down in a way that left such a pervasive bad taste that I'm still unable to conjure any fond recollections. I frittered away a lot of precious time on people and things that didn't warrant my energies.
As the saying goes. everything's always 20/20 in hindsight.
In the meantime, that long stretch of years that I burned to the ground sits piled up with all of life's other musty old regrets, stacked high in the in the dank, craggy recesses of my mind like so much wet, spoiled cord wood.
Everyone I surrounded myself with in those years is gone. I have no 'old friends' to call on or reminisce about past exploits with. I suppose it's a shame, but I'm not really big on rehashing 'the past' over beers with dodgy shadows of douchedom from the often better forgotten annals of yesteryear.
Before John Lydon became a complete waste of space, he made a number of pretty good records.
I have no time for liars or phonies.
Sour grapes aside, without all of this muddy water under the bridge, I wouldn't be where I am right now...which is a fair stretch better than some of the alternatives I can picture. It's been one hell of a ride. After all is said and done, I'm glad that I decided to leave Vancouver back in early 1994.
Of course, I continue to miss things about my old hometown. People and places that are long gone. Hiraeth, if you will.
Most importantly, had I not split that scene thirty years ago, I wouldn't have met Mina.
As I always tell her, she's "the centre of my donut".
Thursday, March 14th - The Ides of March/Day of The Damned
A big thanks to my lovely wife Mina for being on the ball, and getting us in on the pre-sale for this show. She made this possible.
This is super exciting. We haven't been out to a show since just before Covid hit. We saw KISS do their 'End of the Road' tour at Nagoya Castle's Dolphin's Arena on Dec.19th, 2019. While it was enjoyable enough for the predictable spectacle it was, I hated thinking that KISS might actually go down as the last live show I'd ever see. By mid February 2020 the first COVID cases started cropping up here in Losersville, and from there everything steadily went to complete shit for pretty much the next two years solid.
Four years later, as things have gradually started coming back to life (as far as live events and the such being scheduled), it's become apparent that times have changed. Whereas there had been a steadily declining number of acts electing to come through this here Deadbeat City in the decade or so leading up to the pandemic, now there are even fewer. Part of the problem may be that I'm getting old, and the palate of acts that I would be inclined to want to go see is shrinking. Then there's the sad fact that Nagoya audiences are fairly similar to minimally animated cadavers, and next to impossible to get any reaction out of.
As the more astute members of my readership may have guessed, I'm an early Gen X'er (born in 1966). A lot of my friends were borderline, or late period 'Boomers'... and my tastes in music and pop culture pretty much reflect the time and place I hail from. Anyways, when The Damned announced this tour toward the end of last year, I was almost certain that they'd skip Nagoya. We had to go out to Osaka to see their 40th anniversary fete in March 2017. This time around the main attraction is a return of their classic era line-up from the early 80's.
When they announced this Nagoya gig early in January, I flipped out. This is a big deal. A big enough deal to actually risk getting a dose of COVID for. As far as legacy bands still playing today, I can't think of a single one that beats out The Damned. I never had an opportunity to see this particular incarnation of the group play back in the day, so this is kind of a bucket list thing. Mina's going to get off work a couple of hours early today, then we'll be off to Diamond Hall at around 5:30. It's a reasonable mid-sized venue with a 1,014 head capacity about 20 minutes drive from here. I've seen a long list of great shows there over the years.
Fingers crossed this show is as good as I hope it'll be. Details on the evening's proceedings will follow...
Out front of FLEX BLDG, in Shinsakae, at around 6:15 pm. There's a huge line-up just to the left, and no 'Sold-Out' sign as yet.
Monday, March 18th
Saint Patrick's Day across the pond. I gave up on all that wearing green and downing pints of Guinness bollocks years ago. 'Amateur Hour', as my father so aptly put it... back when he was able weigh in on such matters.
Monday is for domestic chores in these precincts...and I usually finish with that business just short of noon, after which I head up the canal for a 10km start of the week beating. While today was sunny and bright, and 12C tops (about average for this time of year), it felt a lot colder (as it was windy as fuck) - so I bailed on the great outdoors, and did another 22km on the spin bike instead. As for my soundtrack du jour, the last week or so has been all about this fancy expanded version of the brilliant 1980 Squeeze album ArgyBargy on the streaming service. I've ditched London Town, and been playing that on auto-repeat. Such a great, great record.
'Et tu, Brute?'
The Damned show out at Diamond Hall on Thursday evening really exceeded all expectations. One of those rare times that a band is so good that it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. I could gush on and on endlessly, really. A real bucket list experience. I've seen the band four other times, but never in this incarnation, with the key line-up from the early 80's all on board. The presence of a legitimate rhythm section is particularly crucial to a band like The Damned. Paul Grey (bass) and Rat Scabies (drums) are legends.
Consider THE WHO - a legacy act with which The Damned share some key sonic commonalities. Now, imagine Keith Moon and John Entwistle (the original drummer and bass player, respectively) somehow getting spit back out of the ether and rejoining the two surviving members when they still had a bit of life left in them (twenty years ago, for argument's sake)...and how that might have elevated what had become 'two original members and a collection of well meaning ringers' playing to the group's past glories to something important...an actual next level event.
This was that 'next level'. Almost completely different to The Damned as I had seen them before.
Not the full show, but a good smattering of the proceedings here in Deadbeat City, filmed from near the front. All things considered, the quality is pretty good. Mina shot a few songs that look and sound better, but a good friend and fellow Damned fan back in Vancouver sent me this link, and it does the trick.
Thursday evening was the second show of this year's world tour, and they were fresh and obviously having a great time. The usually staid Nagoya crowd were actually lively and responsive, and the Hall looked to be capacity, though I think there were still some tickets available when we arrived about an hour pre-show (there was no 'SOLD OUT' sign plastered across the poster in front of the venue like in Osaka). I assume they were all snapped up in fairly short order, as the line-up to get in was a long one.
As I've said, these days we don't get many shows of interest in this deadbeat town...so every time out could actually be our last. If that is indeed the case here, we wrapped up our concert going days with an absolute banger. The Damned set the bar so high here, that I can't imagine anyone easily exceeding it. I might even go so far as to say that it may be one of the best shows I've ever seen (and in over 45 years of spectating, I've seen a shit ton).
I was also glad to see Mina thoroughly enjoying herself. She's had them playing on a loop in her van for the last month and a bit; while she's not especially big on 'punk rock' per se, she's warmed to The Damned more than any other act associated with that unfortunate label - no doubt due to the band's versatility and broad sonic palette. In short, the core members are legends, and the band (in all of its incarnations) has a 48 year legacy of releasing consistently good albums packed with memorable tunes that seamlessly shift gears between multiple genres.
What a way to kick the dregs of winter out the fucking door. Sadly, the rest of this year is almost sure to be pretty anti-climatic after that display.
Next up is the final day of kindergarten for the current school year (Japanese school years wrap in March, as opposed to June), and a misty farewell to the 2023-24 five/six year old class after three years of English learning shenanigans. This will be a tough one, as this particular group ranks right up with my personal favourites in 28 years of teaching over there.
This bittersweet event will get underway at 10:30 am sharp tomorrow morning. Hopefully I don't blubber.
Tuesday, March 18th - the last day of winter 23/24
Just when it's supposed to be spring, it appears that winter isn't quite done with us just yet. This morning was a frigid one. It seems that this trend will culminate with a late January level blast of icy unpleasantness Thursday, before settling into the other recent trend, ' penetrating cold and wet' for the balance of the weekend.
None of this bodes well for the cherry blossoms. Early forecasts had been for the sakura to start opening around the 17th. Last week that was revised to the 22nd. Now it seems more likely sometime next week...making it just over a week later than last year. Oh, well. We have no intentions of partaking in any of the alcohol fueled Hanami season foolishness that abounds at this time of year. Lord knows I did quite enough of that when I was younger.
The allergies seem to be acting up a bit today, too. Hopefully this isn't the harbinger of a more miserable few weeks to come. Fortunately I'm well stocked with meds and inhalers...and even have some antibiotics saved, just in case my sinusitis flares up.
Last year at this time I was grappling with a major dose of that, while healing up from my skin cancer surgery. I'll be back in to the oncologist's early next month for a follow up. I don't think I'll ever really get used to that scar on my face.
"Better than being dead", as Mina says.
The last day of kindergarten for the 23/24 school year came and went with less fanfare than usual. This is the first year the kids didn't present me with a handmade poster or make a big deal of saying 'good-bye'. It felt weird...but it wrapped like any other day. I was a bit sad, as I had been particularly fond of this group of five/six year olds. I thanked them, wished them luck at elementary school and wrapped it up, as I do on normal days. A few of them mobbed me, grabbed on to my legs and followed me to the office after class. One of them shouted 'I love you!', which was sweet. Something about it seemed odd and a bit flat, though. Times change, I guess.
Insect daughter was waiting in the office with my pay packet and the receipt for me to sign.
'Sorry we didn't announce that from this year the children wouldn't be presenting any gifts to teachers, because they are too busy...so sorry!'
I offered up a faint smile and gave a shrug.
'That's OK. I have quite a collection from past years already, and nowhere to keep them all.'
While I do have a bunch of them stored away in our futon closet, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed in the 'cooler approach' the Insects seem to be adopting. I will will be sure to tailor my expectations moving forward. April 19th will be the start of year 29 over there. That's just over half my fucking life. Japan is weird like this. At my point of origin, the longer one works somewhere, the more affection they are generally treated with. Often, one's pay and position is almost always commensurate with the amount of time served. Here it's quite the opposite. At the age of 60, full time workers are expected to either step aside and hope that their savings hold up until their meagre national pension allotment kicks in at 65, or take a massive (40%) pay cut, and assume the title 'part-time worker' (though they are essentially expected to work the same number of hours doing the same job they've always done). Of course, their summer and winter bonuses are drastically cut as well.
This might make some sad amount of sense if there were scads of fresh staff coming in every April, eager to take up the jobs of said 'tired old senior workers'...but most often, this just isn't the case. This is especially true in hospitals, where critical staffing shortages are a sad reality. Mina will have to grapple with this situation very soon, and as far as my future as a part time teacher over at the Insecthead's kindergarten is concerned, I wonder if I'll be discreetly shown the door at 60?
A sad reality of life in Japan is that, unless one has made adequate advanced preparations or is blessed enough to be independently wealthy, the financial burdens and challenges of the autumnal and twilight years of one's life can translate into some very lean times, and quite often some level of poverty.
Unlike South Korea, where respect for the aged and deference to seniority is a big thing, in Japan the aged are typically treated like unwanted garbage. On the cusp of 60, and with no children to look after us in our dotage, I have some genuine concerns about what lies in store for Mina and I in the years ahead.
On that bright note, I'll wrap this cud chew up until my next seasonal dispatch, which will see us moving from spring to summer. It will be Tsuyu (rainy season), the halfway point of the year. Seems very distant, but it will be upon us in a flash.
Until then, you'd do well to remember that,
'No matter where you go...there you are.'
There, and nowhere else.
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