Forty Years From Now

My new album Forty Years from Now is finally out! The first quote-unquote single "Cat vs. Mouse" is available for free download and features vocals from UT of the band Kiiiiiii and production from Pandatone. The twelve-song album was recorded, mixed, and mastered in various recording studios and bedrooms across Tokyo and New York City.

For those interested in purchasing a physical copy, either order from my label Music Related or retailers like Other Music, Darla, DotShop (Sweden), Parasol, Warszawa (Japan), and HMV Japan. (Those U.S.-residents ordering from Music Related get a free orange-vinyl 7" from Japanese picopop bands MacDonald Duck Eclair and Micro Mach Machine.) Digital downloads are available from Other Music, Amazon, Boomkat (UK), Rhapsody, and iTunes. (Those links go directly to my album page where you can hear samples of the tracks.)

Thanks to Néojaponisme Art Director Ian Lynam for the cover design.

Marxy DJ at Bar Drop 12/22

Short notice, but I will be DJing at Bar Drop in Kichijoji at an all-night event on Friday, February 22. No clue on timing, but I shouldn't go on too late.

As usual, Dr. Usui from Motocompo and Ian Martin (Call and Response Records) will be deejaying. Live performance from beloved Neo-Shibuya-kei cuties Hazel Nuts Chocolate.

MXUT DJ at Bar Drop 11/22

For those in Tokyo, I will be DJing with U.T. from Kiiiiiii as "MXUT" at Bar Drop in Kichijoji at an all-night event on Thursday, November 22. We should go on at 1:00 am or so.

Lots of other super-great people will be DJing, such as Dr. Usui from Motocompo, Higuma from bluebadge label, and Ian Martin (Call and Response Records). Live performance from "tokyo pinsalocks" and ロラ・コルビ with マロン.

Marxy "Lecture"!

I, W. David Marx aka Marxy, will be giving a short "lecture" this Friday, November 2 as part of Radio OK FRED's cultural cavalcade within Cyril Duval's DISPLAYSTHETICS installation at Celine.

Official Info:

Radio OK FRED will be hosted by Jean Snow, Egaitsu Hiroshi, Yoshi and Ay2 as a public recording held at the installation of French artist Item Idem, displayed at Celine Omotesando as part of DesignTide. A beautiful space, a crazy display, free entrance, free drinks from 18:00 to 20:00, nice music, great talk, and who knows…

Friday Nov 2nd: Special Creativity Now!
with David W. Marx [sic], Antonin Gaultier aka Digiki, Marie from colette and PMKFA.

From 6 to 8 PM

FREE !

Celine Flagship store, B1F

ONE Omotesando, 3-5-29 Kita Aoyama, Minato-ku 107-0061

R$$ (or Are Ess Ess?)

There may just be some content over here once in a while, but I just want to make sure that you've added Néojaponisme to your regular RSS reading schedule. You will find equally inflammatory articles over there.

For "techy" people, here is the RSS feed.

Content Starts on Néojaponisme

Néojaponisme kicks off this week with a five-part interview with Dr. Patricia Steinhoff, Professor of Sociology at University of Hawaii (Manoa) and expert on the Japanese New Left/Japanese Red Army.

(Post comments over there this time.)

Neojaponisme

Neojaponisme.com — a new web journal from the founder of Néomarxisme and friends.

JJ and Johnny's

Today is the 23rd, and I don't have to tell you that the 23rd is the sale date for the most popular women's fashion monthlies. Oh, CanCam, your 560 pages last month could hardly hold me over for thirty-one painful days!

I went over to the JJ site to check out the contents and noticed something odd about the cover. Just a white box with the logo? I had assumed this was a temporary solution to some sort of design problem, that the proper cover image would be up in no time. But I went over to the bookstore and noticed something extraordinary: Kimura Takuya from SMAP on the cover, sandwiched between two of the normal JJ models.

So the blank image was no mistake at all! Again we see the draconian and utterly ridiculous Johnny's Jimusho policy towards images of its stars used on the internet. Yes, JJ can use Kimura Takuya on its cover, available in newsstands across the land, but no, JJ cannot use its own cover image on the internet to promote the issue. Otherwise, people on the internet may be able to figure out what Kimura Takuya looks like. Or they will be so mollified by a tiny 155 x 193 pixel jpg that they'll cease buying those 3"x5"s of Kimutaku at idol shops in Harajuku. Or Johnny's is just so controlling that they even don't let their talents hang mirrors in the company dorm lest light reflect upon a surface and portraits be viewed without proper payment.

At a decade circulation low of 175,634 copies a month, JJ needs some sort of gimmick to get back in the game, and the Faustian bargain of Johnny's involvement is a surefire way to move paper. Johnny's in return gets some nice promotion for Kimura's newest Hero film opening in September. So Kobunsha can use Kimura's image to boost JJ sales, but not show evidence of this collaboration on the internet, where evil dwells and the 21st century naturally eradicates anachronistic and feudalistic business practices propping up the current oligopoly. Johnny's Jimusho has seen the future and their genius solution is to completely avoid it.

Gossip is Hard to Read

Rumor has it that Japan's most beloved female singer Koda Kumi is dating Japan's most talented dance group vocalist Nakai from Japan's most lovable replacement for Hikaru Genji — SMAP.

Now this confuses me a bit, since I was operating on the gossip that Koda Kumi was determined to get married by the age of 25 and had a long-term "non-celebrity" boyfriend who manages some sort of drinking establishment. If I had set myself a date for marriage at 25 and had only a few months left to go, I would probably stick with the boyfriend of four years and not switch over to a slave to an entertainment agency that does not let any of its employees get married (unless, of course, they knock up someone famous. Retirement and death are also acceptable.)

Not to mention that the timing on the Koda-Nakai romance is suspicious when viewed from the angle of organizational relations. Here again, Avex and Johnny's Jimusho have come together to make a model romance and thrust their stars into the pages of gossip weeklies. Last time they tried this, they got seven whole years out of the relationship between Hamasaki Ayumi and TOKIO heartthrob Nagase. This ended about a month ago, so in my delusional paranoid understanding, a meeting was called, two candidates were chosen and the management companies sealed the deal with a handshake: Kuu-tan, meet your new fictional beau. Nakai, go ahead and tell your friends about this.

The great thing about these mock relationships is that they don't get in the way of real sexual priorities. Even if Nakai goes off and does what he wants, it's not like magazines would dare write a story about the girlfriends of SMAP members. If Johnny's Jimusho Youth Brigades get photographed at a wild sex party, the press will graciously black the eyes out to secure deniability. I mean, Hamasaki Ayumi didn't let her faux relationship to Nagase get in the way of her real engagement to Futura 2000's son back in 2004.

With so much of this celebrity gossip being a mix between press releases on one side and completely unreliable sensationalism on the other, I find it very difficult to tell which stories I am supposed to believe for the artist's sake and which I am supposed to ignore. A few weeks ago, I heard a second-hand story that the Friday article about Babel-babe Kikuchi Rinko dating a foreigner was based on dubious information directly from the Kikuchi camp. The "foreigner" had met her once, but was of the old school that considered meeting someone different than "dating."

Long story short, we public have no real allies in this information war. For a long time, there has been a defense of the Japanese news system that important investigative stories do come out, just not in the newspapers or on TV. Most famously, a weekly shukanshi broke the Lockheed Scandal rather than the mainstream media. So great, information cannot be completely controlled, but if I was an elite trying to keep reigns on power, I would be overjoyed that any non-approved, non-press club information could only find a home in totally unreliable magazines that mix investigative reporting, intentionally leaked stories, and pure fiction.

I guess I am going to keep believing that this Koda-Nakai thing is a total hoax, because that is equally believable as the alternative.

Bonus Topic: Did anyone ever see the MTV show about Misono — Koda Kumi's little sister? The premise was that she had gotten so fat that her management company refused to promote her music, so she went on a diet to lose weight to win her career back. Turning lemons into lemonade, that management company helped make the humiliating exercise of forced dieting into an extremely dignified reality TV show. She apparently gained all the weight back, because just maybe, she has naturally has an endomorphic body type and the weight wasn't a problem to start with. But may I suggest that she has no real hereditary claims to automatic pop success anyway? Her equivalent in the world of homicide would be the little brother of the guy who claimed he killed Jon Benet.

Mein Totally Cool Kampf 2

Image supplied by Matt Alt of AltJapan