Gas Panic is a nightclub (actually two nightclubs) in Tokyo. One of the requirements of being in the place is that you must drink continually as long as you are inside, to the point that if you put your drink down somewhere, the staff will take it away and make you buy another one.
Here we see Joanne dutifully obeying this rule.
Visited for a few days. Bustling and exciting, as I remembered it. Every third shop sells mobile phones. The Peak still has an unbeatable view.
I’ve become quite a fan of karaoke. Some people inexplicably like to sing on a karaoke stage, where you sing on a stage in front of everyone else in the place, but I prefer the karaoke box, where you and your friends pile into a private room to sing, eat and drink. At some places, you can also hire instruments (such as tambourines, maracas, and cacophonous fake electric guitars). These can be useful for drowning out particularly grating singers.
The selection of songs is generally huge. There are tens of thousands of Japanese songs and thousands of English songs, as well as Chinese, Korean, French, and other languages. Everyone sings Japanese or English when I go, but it’s always good to throw in an ’80s German pop song from time to time.
It’s a bit distressing how many people regress to the late ’70s or early ’80s when they get behind the mic, even people who are young enough to know better. Queen’s ’70s epic “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a favourite for karaoke hilarity because of all the funny voices you can use, and for the Wayne’s World-style headbanging bit in the middle.
This artist beautifully captures the angst of disaffected youth. (Like, 8-year-old youth.)
I heard Yuki‘s song 66db, an odd, Bjork-ish ballad, in the J-Pop Cafe one night. Later, I bought her album to celebrate my new job, She’s melodious, in a rockin’ kind of way. One of the songs is called The End of Shite.
Curry-filled donuts (or doughnuts) are a surprisingly popular snack in Japan. They are available everywhere from local bakeries to Starbucks, and they taste as good as they sound.
A teacher from Tokyo gets posted to a country town and spends his time getting into misadventures and complaining about the shifty country folk. Quite fun! Maybe one day I will be able to read it in the original Japanese.
I visited Tokyo for a couple of weeks in 1992. I came away with the impression that everything is funny, inexplicable or amusing, or all three. Now that I live here, I have realised that this is partly because I harldy understand the language, but partly because things really are strange. Especially TV.
I just saw this in a shop and bought it on the spot. It turns out to be a soundtrack album. It has a handful of decent songs, a few instrumentals and a number of jarring dialogue snippets from what sounds like, but to be fair probably isn’t, an American teen movie. I was expecting a proper album, and I was disappointed, but taken on its own merits it’s all right.
The 6ths are really The Magnetic Fields with guest vocalists. Of course, they don’t approach the majesty of The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs (the best album in the world… ever) but their albums are still essential, at least to me.
The two albums are Hyacinths and Thistles and Wasps’ Nests. Note how the band and album names are specifically chosen to be awkward to pronounce. Perverse? Yes. H & S has more brilliant, tuneful, hearfelt songs than most bands manage in a career. There’s also the fun final track, which slowly fades out over what seems like several hours.
Wasps’ Nests doesn’t quite have the sounds or the songs, but there are still many lovely moments. And bonus points for featuring Chris Knox, the Godfather of New Zealand alternative music.