neomarxisme

The atomic clock has struck 2006, and the new year finds me oddly agreeing with Momus: it's great to be back in Japan. We have different reasons, of course. He needed to "recharge his batteries." I needed to return to solid ground after a hellish afternoon on a terrifying aeroplane excursion.

Two weeks earlier, I had quipped to my parents that the Narita-Houston-Pensacola route was as easy as "commuting." Through the magic of movies and Zelda - Second Quest, I had come to find a new simplicity in passing those eleven to thirteen hours trapped in a seat with little leg room. Intercontinental flight: my generation's equivalent of taking the F out to Forest Hills.

Oh the irony. At Hour 9 on my return flight, somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk, the plane started violently jerking up and down. I'm no stranger to slightly bumpy rides, the occasional roller coaster drop, but I had never been through anything quite as frightful as what I experienced for the next forty minutes. The mystery air condition introduced me to a whole new world of plane movements - the side to side shift, the shakey, shakey grumble, the five second free fall. I literallly clutched my seat with both hands and dripped sweat, only to have the pilot come on and tell us all, "Everyone, please buckle your seatbelt, as we're going to be in this for the next thirty to forty minutes."

As I rode out these terrible waves, I suddenly came to understand the total delusion and hubris of air travel. Usually, the calm stillness of the airplane suggests a time-consuming version of teleportation: you sit in a seat quietly for several hours and then you're suddenly somewhere else. In the "moderate" turbulence yesterday, I could hear the Sun melting away the wax from our wings, Kid Icarus chuckling heartily from the Famicon Mini cartridge in my bag. The shaking and stochastic movements reminded me, yes, I'm in a giant metal object flying thousands of miles an hour, hundreds of miles over a icey sea. The Mongols got it right - they saw the whole world and never got more than six feet off the ground.

I really didn't want to die in this manner, especially since the last film I saw was NANA, which featured the worst acting in a motion picture since, well, the last Japanese mainstream film featuring good-looking young people. (Nakshima Mika may be an adequate singer, but she's a black hole on screen, sucking in what little talent the supporting cast brought to the production.) Finally, we got back to smooth skies at minute 45 or so, at which point, two dozen passengers ran for the bathroom. Few stomachs can take prolonged periods of unsolicited theme park thrills and spills.

The pilot warned of more turbulence as we approached the ground, but it was nothing compared to earlier. Customs was easy too. For the first time in ages, they didn't intentionally bring the drug dogs over to me and my bags to sniff out "MDMA" or "LSD" or "banana peels" or whatever they think they're stopping. I suspect the dogs get お正月 holidays off, especially this year.

Now that I've survived and will not board a plane for a while, I can spend the next few days finishing my thesis. I send it to the binders on Friday morning. The jetlag is zapping my revision prowess a bit, but I'm just happy to be in a place where the ground underneath me doesn't violently jerk around. Well, at least not for forty straight minutes.

The thesis is now at the binder, and I am ready to give my heart and soul back to the Internet.

By the way, I believe that my thesis contains the worst pick up line of all time: is the perceived homogeneity in Japan determined fully by the racial-linguistic unity associated with the Japanese nation or is it a byproduct of market structural forces pushing towards cultural stability for the continued success of rationalized production logics?

Maybe it's my age or my gender or my nationality or my political leanings or some deeply-repressed Kindergarden memory, but I'm a fundamentally cynical person. And here again, I find myself deeply intrigued by Momus's ability to project notions of Zen Buddhist calm and anti-consumerist progressivism onto the contemporary Japanese love of sleep, I can't help but think there may be other forces in the world that explain the national penchant for constant dozing other than vague implications of "free choice" or "cultural determinism."

Japanese culture is openly pro-sleep the same way it is openly pro-sex, and the existence of all that sloth and lust porn neatly coincides with the fact that Japan is absolutely the least sexed and least rested of all post-Industrial nations. You always want what you can't have.

But the Japanese obsession with sleeping and eating concerns more than satiating physiological needs: if daily life constantly unfolds in the same mechanical loop of sleeping, commuting, working, commuting, and sleeping, the only moments an individual can truly grasp "alone time" are during meals and naps. At least in the traditional system, work and school involve a total dedication of self to a locked room in a strict hierarchy. Forget "fun" as escape: the constant after-work tsukiai routines undermine the idea of "hitting the town" as a self-driven activity. Sleeping thus becomes a perfect zone to express individualism, where the self can finally disengage from society without the need to make excuses for a lower level of dedication to the organization.

At least in America, the time after work is "me time" if not "Miller Time," and there are enough hours to self-medicate and bask in the false sense of freedom before going back to the office to resume cog duty the following morning. Anyone who's ever worked at a traditional Japanese office - with the milling around for two hours post "closing time" and the endless drinking with boring old managers and getting home on the last train only to get up the next day and do the same thing again - will know that sleep is the only chance to get the world off your back.

The Journal of Unindustriousness ku:nel is not targeted to people who are engaged in these ego-detaching corporate jobs, but written for younger people with a lot of time on their hands. The same general principle holds though: when society's eye is watching your every move, sleep is the only escape.

I have not been interested in seeing the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Proof. What do you mean "proof"? Mathematical proof? Proof as in evidence proof? These figurative, double-meaning titles drive me up the wall! Marche de l'empereur??? I thought it was about penguins!

The Japanese film distribution marketing geniuses understand my dilemma and have graciously given the film a more appropriate, comprehensible, and literal title: Proof of My Life (『プルーフ・オブ・マイ・ライフ』) I get it now: It's a chick flick.

Despite the ubiquitous houdai title change, this movie campaign clues us into the workings of artistic legitimization in Japan. How do distributors convince possible consumers that the work in question is worth paying 1800 yen to see?

At the very top of the ad, large text boasts of the filmmaker and casts' credentials: 「アカデミー賞最有力」, which is something like "The Greatest Oscar-Power." (Note that the film has yet to actually win an Academy Award, but the director and actors have.) There is also note about Golden Globe nominations. This is legitimization through foreign prestige, and not particularly suprising.

Then there are four quotes about the film. As we all know, American advertisements for movies frequently feature snippets from newspaper and magazine reviews, sometimes from real critics, sometimes not. Consumers are either supposed to be wowed by these "professional" critics' near-objective positive judgments or be persuaded that a specific reviewer's subjective views match their own. Maybe Ebert's word is not The Word, but more often than not, he knows what I like.

The four quotes on this Proof of My Life poster - which is ostensibly a serious, Oscar-contending tear-jerker - are not from critics, but from four actors: Yoshiyuki Kazuko, Hirosue Ryoko, Nagatsuka Keishi, and Kuriyama Chiaki. Yoshiyuki and Nagatsuka may have some cred on the creative front, but asking Kuriyama and Hirosue what they thought of the film is like asking the hot, slightly intellectual girl in your homeroom what she saw at the movies last weekend. And that's the point: legitimization in Japan is less about proving objective value through qualified experts and more about associations with human contexts. The logic goes: I like Kuriyama Chiaki, so I will like this movie. The actual content is somewhat arbitrary.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but the problem with this non-critical, associative approach is that it tends to de-emphasize product quality. The idea in the U.S. is not that Ebert rules because he wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but that these anonymous wonks - whose job is to review movies with their expert opinion - are vouching for the quality. And when consumers reward quality, producers emphasize quality in the creative process over associative elements like stars. Now, star vehicles still sell well in "cognitive-consumer" countries like the United States, and in the case of Japan, distributors often succeed by using associative, affective techniques to sell innovative, star-less Western films. So, bad and good are possible in both markets, but knowing that a star or a star quote can sell a film, why would Japanese producers ever worry about consumer perceptions of product quality?

In my real life, I may write friends email forwards that read, "G-Rons, look what someone just sent me a 'link' to! If you have a subscription to the Inter Net, you should totally check out this live performance of the video game Punch Out." But no matter how funny I found that online clip, I certainly shouldn't be wasting valuable blog space on it. (Next week: the AWESOMENESS of Chronic-Narnia-Cles.)

Recently the meta-blogs have been abuzz with various amateur home videos of what appear to be high school talent showcases featuring teenagers re-enacting or musically recreating various mid-1980s Nintendo software titles. When it's not Little Mac beating up the one-waza Don Flamenco (Pt. I), it's the Mario theme on glockenspiel. Famicon nostalgia is at its peak, and I sometimes find myself voluntary listening to bossa nova indie pop records made completely with four-channel 8-bit sound.

Now if the kids in these videos are really high school students, and these clips are recent, that means - are you ready for this? - they are recreating games made before they were even born. Put this in context: the first time these kids probably picked up a NES, it was 1996 and Crash Bandicoot was on the cover of Time. Power Gloves were so marked down in price that you could buy four - and leave two in your locker at school.

But hey, who wasn't making non-video game tributes to massively outdated video games in their teen years? Just to illustrate once and for all that "the more things change, the more they stay the same," I've dug into my childhood collection of artwork and now present "non-video game tributes to early video games."

EARLY ITALIAN FUTURIST THEATRE PIECE ABOUT BASEBALL
by W. David Marx, age 16

A: 11111111111111111111111111111111
B: 00000000000000000000000000000000
A: (becomes a bullet)
B: Can I be "A" next time? You are always "A."
(curtain falls)
Audience: We throw fruit at you - and just as legend has it, Boccioni shall cover himself with his painting and then die years later in a wartime equestrian accident.

HAIKU ABOUT POPEYE

We go all the way
to FAO Schwartz and now
this is what we buy?

NO LIMIT TEXAS HOLD 'EM POKER VERSION OF PONG

DUTCH WIKIPEDIA SITE LOOSELY BASED ON BURGERTIME

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger

A COMMERCIAL TRANSACTION INVOLVING OLD ISSUES OF NINTENDO POWER

Don't take my word for it. See for yourself!

MY TELEPHONE NUMBER

007-373-5963

My new years' resolution for this year is to stop saying "Nice play, Shakespeare" when somebody screws up.

Last night, I stumbled upon the fact that the late 50s student Leftist group Bund is now a political NGO working towards the establishment of an emperor-less Japanese republic and greater environmental consciousness. They currently have an essay on their their website railing against Koizumi's free-market reforms and the fact that Japan has now made the OECD Top Five in Income Inequality. I found the latter to be very shocking.

According to the OECD data available here, the Relative Poverty rating for Japan is now 15.3% - which means that 15.3% of the population lives on one-half the average income. This is significantly greater than the OECD average of 10.2%, and Japan is only outdone by Ireland, Turkey, the United States, and Mexico (although not all OECD countries are reporting). Especially in recent days, the growth of wealth in the United States has gone hand in hand with an unfortunate discrepancy in incomes, and the American economy is now the international symbol for 21st century global capitalism - efficiency at the cost of equality. That being said, the relative povery rate of the U.S. is 17.1% - only a few points greater than Japan's rate. And what's more, Japan's famously low Gini coefficient - now at 31.4 - has reached above the OECD average and is much greater than the Ginis of the more progressive European countries.

Scholars like David Harvey believe that income inequality is inherent in the "late capitalist system," so we should hardly be shocked that the Number Two world economy has become segmented among class lines. For a long time, however, Japan has been widely perceived as "classless" and an exemplary case of "fair" capitalism. These new developments thus question the foundation of that enduring national image and call for a re-evaluation of past perspectives.

In a wider view of history, Japanese income equality is a relatively new concept. Before World War II, the Japanese social structure consisted of a very elite, wealthy capitalist class and a mass of poor farmers and workers, but the destruction of domestic infrastructure and the loss of the Asian colonies completely decimated the upper classes' vast fortunes at the end of the war. This cleared the stage for a far more equal economic realignment, further reinforced by the liberal New Dealers' vigorous land reform campaign and strong union positions in early wage negotiations. During Japan's dramatic economic rise from the early 1950s to the mid 1970s, the benefits were equally distributed to almost all members of society, and moreover, Japan suddenly had a massive "New Middle Class" that set the lifestyle standard for the new post-War era. Both economically and psychologically, it was fair to say that Japan was a "middle class nation."

From the 1970s on, however, the Gini coefficient slowly began to increase, and the speculative growth of the Bubble era only benefitted those with pre-existing real estate or financial holdings. When the economy bit the dust in the early 90s, non-essential employees were out of work and companies began to reduce recruitment of young graduates. All in all, Japan's economy stagnated for a decade, and the subsequent destruction of the old employment system - and rise in "unfair" meritocratic salary schemes - started up a vicious trend in income inequality. Very few people, however, imagined the class divides would be inching near American levels.

Despite the growth in relative poverty, most obsevers would have a hard time finding Japan to be a "class society." There is still no real underclass, besides a small minority of non-assimilating Koreans and silently-repressed burakumin. But most importantly, all eyes are on the Tokyo megatroplis - a city with very few neighborhoods approaching "ghetto" status. Despite the rise of homeless men inhabiting the major parks in recent years, one would have to step off the beaten path to find authetically downtrodden neighborhoods.

The Japanese countryside, however, is a completely different story. The central bureaucracy's "economic development" plan for the prefectures has always involved massive construction projects and no real assistance with the establishment of regional industries, and now that the major Japanese companies are closing their domestic factories and moving jobs to China, a vast majority of the inaka offers very little opportunity for young workers.

Whether all income inequality can be attributed to "American"-style capitalist reforms, the restructuring of Japanese corporate employment to a more sound globally-competitive position certainly did wipe away a lot of the safeguards built into the old system. The rise of income equality in the Bubble era, however, suggests that the Japanese system did not provide a perfect answer to "natural" unfairness in capitalist economies irregardless to what happened next. Whatever the case, recent data tell the story of a class-structured Japan, and as we'll see next time, class consciousness, marketing strategies, and cultural creation are all changing accordingly.

Next installment: the "Downwardly Mobile Society" of Miura Atsushi's 『下流社会』

I've got one question for you: which of the following three is more fly? (a) Mickey "scratching" a record (b) Donald and Goofy with their hats backwards and big gold chains (c) Chip and Dale breakdancing

If you answered "(d) all of the above," the new Japanese hip hop vs. Disney compilation Breaks & Beats Disney is for you. A lot of (misinformed!) people accuse Japanese hip hop of not keeping it real, but thanks to generous financial backing from the Walt Disney Corporation, Japanese hip hop giants like MURO, DJ Hasebe, and Zeebra have been able to take hip hop out of its original staid street setting to the new, unexplored territory of gift shops and five year-olds' birthday parties. But just because the album's cover is printed on shiny gold foil doesn't mean that they've sold out - honestly, is there a real difference between doing a hard-hitting street remix of "Mary Poppins" and replacing the word "Tennessee" with "Hennessy" in a new version of that old Arrested Development song? The world has waited too long to hear a "back-in-the-dayz" electro remix of the "Main Street Electrical Parade" and finally someone was willing to get into the dirt and pull this magic out of the garden. (And the CD comes with a free gold sticker of goofy with a ghetto blaster.)

I know what you're thinking: "Disco Duck" was a harbinger for the end of disco. Well, I've got news for you: Rick Dees is barely involved with this project and I've been told Dimitri from Paris is preparing remixes of Mickey Mouse Disco. And if Japan still leads the world in cutting-edge underground culture, we'll soon hear 50 Cent and the Bucket Hat Guy that's Not Tony Yayo dropping rhymes over Mulan grooves on mixtapes from the Pelham Parkway to Pacific Palisades.

My review of Dydo's beverage American Coffee is now featured at Chin Music Press' cannedcoffee.com.

I just noticed that I went five days without providing the Internet with free content, and I apologize.

Thursday was my last class ever, followed by three drinking engagements: one for graduate students, one for undergraduate students, and one with Momus & Co. Friday, I played back-up (toy) keyboard on one song for Kiiiiiii at their Kyodo Apel show. Saturday, I edited some English for a new Gas Book publication, and then went to go see Kiiiiiii again at Superdeluxe. Yesterday, I finished the bass and harpsichord for a song on the album, and then went all the way out to Enoshima to see Tetsuwari (and Asano Tadanobu's UK 90s guitar-band.) I've also been trying to schedule an overseas vacation to the Very Old Country, do some magazine work, and plan out the final recording for my new album.

So that's my excuse.

As for the Livedoor scandal, this is absolutely the hot topic on the streets here, and most people's views fall into three broad categories: 1) Livedoor deserves to pay for wrecking the collusive 1955 system (slow old people, fatcat bureaucrats, magistrates of the Old Economy, the shukanshi), 2) Livedoor has been set up by the "establishment" (IT mavericks, Horie, Yoshikawa Hinano, slow young people), or 3) Livedoor is the New Enron (Leftists, people who probably know what they're talking about).

The theme song for Tokyo these days is Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero," and when Horie triumphantly came on the scene, a lot of people started playing Denise Williams' "Let's Hear it For the Boy" instead. (The Footloose soundtrack is enormously popular in Japan, second only to the Pretty in Pink O.S.T.) I'm not sure Livedoor is going to turn out to be the next massively corrupt corporation in the WorldCom mold, but clearly Horie has not proven himself to be Kevin Bacon material. This is why M&A deals, like movies, should end on a happy note - in the hidden second half of the story, the Midwestern teenagers of the town realize that dancing is kind of lame and push to reinstate the dancing ban.

Update 6:44 pm: They've decided to arrest Horie tonight. Whether he is the Japanese Ken Lay or not, the speed of this process suggets that the System really had it in for this guy... But when the John Lithgows stage a live-televised raid on the New Economy and it crashes the Nikkei, the people need to see that this legal payback is not just petty revenge, but the valiant government saving the populace from an evil corporate tyrannt.

Just as the "Breaking News" first reported yesterday at dinner time, police arrested Livedoor CEO Horie Takafumi and three other executives on suspicion of financial fraud. For those new to the story, check the excellent coverage on Joi Ito's blog. Despite my forced analog to Footloose, this is a gigantic news event with significant economic and cultural ramifications. Although Livedoor's self-destruction will not cause any huge ripples in the practical workings of the internet infrastructure, there does seem to be a huge psychological shock. When the stock market crashed last week on news of the well-televised Livedoor office raid, completely unrelated tech stocks like Softbank also lost huge amounts of worth. The whole New Economy is now on the table for criticism and dissection.

Whether Horie is innocent or guilty, framed by massive Statist conspiracy or done in by his own greed, last year's Livedoor saga certainly has created a new mental framework for thinking about the future of the Japanese economy. On one side of the ring, the Old Cabal, and on the other side, the New Capitalists. After a shock victory in the Fuji TV battle, things looked good for Livedoor. But the bureaucrats and their O.B.s in charge at the ancien medias have now clearly won the war. Not only has Livedoor been taught a lesson, the maverick company's leader is literally in jail - with only the formality of trial to prove his guilt to an already angry mob public.

Culturally this is a big moment. The horses had been galloping asunder, and now the Old Men have tightened the reigns. Horie was perhaps a terrible representive of the New Economy, but few others have been so bold to standout and give a face to this important new business sector. If Steve Jobs is arrested tomorrow for falsifying data, I'm not sure all of the Silcon Valley companies would suffer. Japan has caught up somewhat with Korea and the U.S. in terms of internet difussion, but there seems to be no broad understanding that this IT world is something more than annoying trend.

In an issue of last year's Can Cam, one of the weird photographic "manga" pieces had a fashionable young female character proudly working at Livedoor. The New Economy had a certain cachet, especially with young people. The newest issue of Can Cam will probably show Ebihara Yuri working at METI. Power is sexy, and a bureaucratically-run Japan has never looked hotter.

Yes, this scandal is just the fall of one not-particularly great company, but I fear the coming malaise upon realization that Horie's experiment was a massive failure. The suits will out be drinking Blue Label in Ginza tonight, certain that Japan has been saved from a scandalous horde. Others may be feeling the despair of a symbolic defeat, drinking can after can of happoshu bought at 7/11.

I'm not a particularly big anime fan for a variety of reasons (mostly petty snobbery). The only shows I've made an effort to watch are the "classic" 70s and 80s television series like Gundam - because it's culturally relevant - and Macross - because it's a goofy love triangle between an idol, a career woman, and a Young, Short Japanese Teenager Archetype trapped inside a mildly interesting space epic. Although somewhat marginal in Japan, Macross' U.S. release as Robotech was a huge milestone for Japanese cultural importation in America.

Before it hit our homes each afternoon, I doubt we ever saw a TV show where multiple main characters die-off in the course of the show. After enduring the depressing Buddhist saga of Gundam last year, I've decided to watch the original Japanese version of Macross to see what I was missing.

During my childhood, "Japanimation" was still considered a mildly retarded artform. My brother and sister used to crack me up by doing real-life impressions of Speed Racer's jerky motions - there's something inherently hilarious about the fact that the characters never talk until they stopped moving. The other hallmark of this anime-bashing was that the characters' lips never matched up to what they were saying. I had always imagined that this was simply because the English translation of Japanese dialogue would never fit the same mouth movements. Same problem with Kung-Fu: it's just the nature of the beast.

What I'm noticing from Macross, however, is that the lips almost never matched the Japanese dialogue in the first place. In the worst cases, a character's mouth will start moving a good second before the speech begins. Things have obviously improved in recent years, but I feel wiser now knowing that I wasn't losing anything in the translation.

This afternoon, I went to the local Sound Studio Noah to record vocals for two songs on my new album, tentatively titled néomarxisme II - De La Soul is Dead. My music is self-financed, created mostly in my bedroom on an iBook and a Mbox, and this would be a slightly interesting biographical detail if it weren't for the fact that almost every single other contemporary musician records in his/her own studio - besides, of course, that growing army of hacky UK angular gloom acts inexplicablly rewarded with a never-ending supply of major label contracts and NME banner headlines. Also, my debut mini-album Kyoshu Nostalgia pretty much sounded like it was recorded on a laptop with a 0 yen budget, so I don't really deserve any points for my thrift. But for this new project, I'm making efforts to improve the sound quality without increasing expenditures, and instead of recording vocals in my extremely street-noise drenched, echo-y room on Setagaya-ku's Ambulance Alley, I'm throwing down the 1000 an hour to get some peace and quiet at the rehearsal studio down the street.

Sound Studio Noah is a chain of rehearsal spaces littered across Tokyo (and beyond, perhaps) that caters to amateur and semi-professional bands. The geography and architecture of Japanese life forbid the kind of dank garage practice I experienced in my teenage years, so everyone has to rent these spaces to really rock it. For a relatively modest fee, you get a room with space-age double-lock noise-proof doors, anti-echo padding, guitar amps, bass amps, a mixer, mics, and a PA - all professional quality. The small vocal booth today was eerily quiet, a certain form of freeter musician luxury.

Walking down daily to the train station area, I am always passing Noah's customers carrying their instruments in gig bags and their effects pedals in specially-sized black cases with silver lining. (Throwing everything into a backpack is a big Orthopraxy Rock no-no.) My worry about these high-quality, low-price studios and the amazing avalanche of gear at your local amateur Japanese rock club is that it seems to breed a minor moral hazard. With enough money, practicing and gigging are painless - a little too easy, if you ask me. There is zero sacrifice required for the art, and that means the whole field is open to a lot of people who treat music as if it were a sporting event - practice, practice, practice, invite friends to the big event, play your songs only to your friends, go get drunk afterwards. I think 90% of the bands I see are having way more fun that the audience.

Now this is the dilemma of our era: making music is surely pleasant and we are blessed that almost everyone has a chance to make music of the quality they hear in the mass media. But do we all have the right to clutter the market (and ultimately the culture at large) with our creations? I know my mom likes eating bread that she has made in her own breadmaking machine, but I'm not sure she is obsessed with finding a distributor for selling her bread to a wider market. Why can't indie music exist at that level? Why does the ease of making music not push players into seeing their actions as a self-rewarding activity unrelated to "getting a record deal" or "becoming a star"? Who thinks that being on a weekend football team will lead to being the next Joe Namath?

And don't think that I am not pondering the same questions in regards to my own musical output: if I enjoy the act of making music, why do I get so starved for outside validation? Why can't I eat my own indie bread? If this album creation is so enjoyable and costs me so little, why in the world do I put a price sticker on it at the end of the day?

Open your Nostalgia Calculator (it's in the Applications folder - OS 10.4 only), and adjusting for the acceleration of time perception over the years, we should have just entered 1988. So get out your "Red Red Wine" cassettes and put on your "Ollie North for President" T-shirt. Or just turn on VH1 and listen to C-list celebrities explain the plot of The Accidental Tourist. And these good-looking dudes on the left want your attention: Bright Lights, Big City, baby.

Some lessons learned from BLBC:

1) A lot of these old movies that have unwittingly become period films are not very good - even considering them from a historical angle. Pretty in Pink - besides James Spader's brilliant impersonation of a 28 year-old teenager - is another example of this phenomenon.

2) A lot of upper middle-class kids move to New York, work in the Fact-Checking department at The New Yorker, yearn to be novelists, develop drug habits, and meet shallow people, but why do they all feel the need to write about it? A wise television writer once told me, the only thing more boring than hearing someone's drug stories or drug addiction drama is listening to someone describe their dreams.

3) Most biographical films are only as interesting as the protagonist's life. Rudy is a mildly entertaining film, but you can't help walk away thinking, this guy gave his whole life just so he could play the last two inconsequential minutes of a Notre Dame game?!? What's more pathetic than the main character, plotting, dialogue, and general themes of Bright Lights, Big City the film is that a man named Jay McInerney actually lived this life and also lacked the common decency to avoid making his story into a bad semi-autobiographical novel and motion picture.

4) This film is worth watching just for a scene of a fake ferret attacking Alex P. Keaton and a drunken Jason Robards.

5) Eerily, this film might as well have been made in New York 2006. The only difference is that people in clubs don't dance to M/A/R/R/S "Pump up the Volume" quite as much.

I am snobby, jaded, cynical, and bored with guitar bands, and due to these character flaws, I have been unenthusiastic in recent days about the state of Japanese non-experimental indie music. But I like this band nhhmbase ("ne-han base"), and they're now officially on my shortlist.

Trevor from Music Related sent me their old demo last year, and despite the fact that the drums were recorded to sound like they're Casio keyboard samples, the three mp3s suddenly and inexplicably became my favorite thing outside of The Beagles. I naturally tend to like off-kilter time sequences: they sound fresh. But so many of these semi-Math Rock bands either spiderweb their guitar lines into boring drones, go jazzy, or start believing that their little science experiment in 11/8 is the hook. nhhmbase's instrumental technique makes 9/8 sound easy, and they remember to write actual songs with melodies and structures. They also show great mastery over dynamics - that kind of Jane's Addiction break-neck movement between pastoral scenes and heavy noise. The singer's voice lifts miraclously into the upper register in short spurts with no warning.

They also avoid the normal rock clutter problem. The drummer nonchalantly plays his "zero tom" kit in simple patterns a la Klaus Dinger. The bass is heavy and provides the underlying riffs. The "lead guitarist" punches individual notes and lets them ring out in feedback (guitar strap: extremely loose and long), while the singer only plays sparse and sparkly jazz chords (guitar strap: extremely tight and high).

Now this would be terribly boring if they weren't drunken and brash and young: stereotypically trashing their instruments at the end, dropping lyrics, breaking multiple strings in the course of the first song. (For those wondering how amateur bands can afford to treat their instruments poorly, lead singer Mamoru was rocking a $200 Fender Squier last night for a few songs - the favorite guitar of fourteen year-olds everywhere.)

Nhhmbase will have a proper release later this year, but until then, enjoy this mp3 from their early demo. Also, a clip of their live performance can be found at the Space Shower TV webpage.

I've been meaning to write about the best-seller Karyu Shakai, which I am reading, but I have been both busy and lazy. While eating kappa maki last night in front of the television (I tragically don't eat fish), I watched a short news special about the "Downwardly Mobile Generation." One guy lived in a house with no heat, read manga all day, and ate one meal daily from leftovers at his job at Mister Donuts. Another guy lived an equal boring life - but with a girlfriend! The main point of the story was that these kids have no dreams of upward mobility or money (although they all seem to want to become famous), but are extremely satisfied with living on $20K a year.

The happiness factor is the interesting twist to this rise in class consciousness. Middle-class kids are indeed dropping out of the rigid employment system, living a comfortable, inexpensive lifestyle, and identifying themselves as "lower class," but they are far from angry about their diminished position. Maybe there's a bit of "Common People" low-rent chic, but the freeter class is much less angry at the system than those yellow-collar workers at the bottom levels of the system itself.

This puts most social commentators in a conundrum: there are practical implications for the freeters' actions (no tax revenue, low birth rate, rise in income disparity), but they're happy - so it's hard to really dig into them. Japan is no more superficial than the United States - Confucianism is as anti-money as the original Christianity. Often, the market becomes an ersatz measure for social propriety, but no one is going to yell at these kids for not going after the gold. And very few have the chutzpah to give them an extended lecture on familial responsibilty in this day and age.

But here's where my perverse sense of conspiratorial overanalysis kicks in: the future structure of global capitalism needs fewer and fewer people to actually man the posts at the white-collar firms, and this will result in an overwhelmingly large amount of people kicked out of the economic system. In the United States, the lower classes are angrier and angrier about their loss of stature and respectable employment, and while they may not be channeling their anger into the right places (Down with Gay Cowboys!), no one is happy to work at McDonalds to support their punk band. In Japan, they have found the perfect solution to the natural bifurcation of labor in 21st century capitalism. The trade offs for money are so high that you have a large section of population voluntarily dropping out and feeling relieved to be out of the rat race.

Perhaps this "happiness" of the lower classes is only a myth to protect the hegemony, but at the worm's eye view, the story seems to check out. Everyone wins: the system no longer has to pay the masses decent wages, and the masses feel lucky to have so much free time.