Hatagaya DJ Night

After the previous evenings marathon, getting up early wasn't one of my highest priorities today. In fact, the only thing that woke me up was the call from the front desk at 11 AM asking if I needed to get my room cleaned. I barely managed to pick up the phone and say no before I looked around and had one of those odd moments when I realized I was in a small business hotel on the other side of the world. Switching on the TV is always a hotel thing for me...even if I don't watch it. Soon the room was filled with sounds of frantic male announcers and high-pitched saleswomen. Seems the only quiet commercials are the beauty ads!

Since today was the last day of the exhibit at Eki gallery I decided to take a long walk around the neighborhood and then hop a subway in Shinjuku to the gallery to help close up.

It was a cloudy but quiet afternoon. The quiet narrow backstreets provided a great way to ease into the day. Also, by this time I was somewhat used to looking over my shoulder-in the correct direction-to make sure I wouldn't suddenly become a road statistic. I could see the headlines "Gaijin flattened by Honda". Lovely. We all noticed a few days back how oddly pedestrians, cars scooters, and bikes all coexisted on the same narrow streets. Tiny, frail, little old ladies calmly walked with the assurance that they lived too long in this world to be worried by getting taken out by a mini-truck.

Besides the plethora of campaign posters everywhere (the big election was today) one of the interesting things I saw was a cue of young men making a line that snaked around a corner. As I got closer I realized that they were lining up to have some sort of a CD signing. Quiet possibly by the idol beaming from the surrounding posters herself. The reason I say quite possibly is that I was not able to see what they were waiting for. The organizers had created a maze-like environment inside created with temporary dividers that made it all but impossible to see anything -- even inside the store. No one...I mean no one got to even glimpse the tarento unless you ponied up the bucks for a disk.

Once I arrived at Shinjuku Station, I was met with the usual crowds one would expect. Although many had mentioned how crazy it would be, it didn't seem too different from the typical Grand Central/Penn Station crowd during any rush hour. Confidently, I walked up to the ticket machine to buy a ticket to my destination. By this time I had somewhat grasped the concept of moving myself around the city and except for a few hiccups where I had to match some kanji (Chinese characters) the reading of maps wasn't too difficult.

While I was on the train I got a call (oh, you can actually get reception in some stations...but its still frowned upon to yap unabashedly) that one of my SF friends was at the gallery. Making a beeline to Shimo-kitazawa I met up with Yoshie and her husband who I had both met while visiting yet another pal in CA a few years back with my dad. Both looked great and after a nice lunch in the area we bid each other goodbye. Yoshie was nice enough to bring some photos of my late dad she took back during that trip. Our last together. It was really great to see those photos and reminded me how dad had always been one of my biggest supporters. The fact that I was able to see those shots while still in Japan was very apropo and touching.

Well, once 6PM came around Junichi closed the doors and went to get his car to help transport the photos to his shop, Erostika in Harajuku. I stayed behind and started the process of taking down the frames and packing them up. It was the first time I had ever taken down an exhibition, so it couldn't help but be a bittersweet moment. Although, pulling those damn nails off the wall sort of took care of that.

After all was down, Junichi and his girlfriend, dropped me off at Heavy Sick club where Billy and Miriam were to be spinning disks that night.

The A-Bones were already there so I sat down to chat with Lars, Marcus and Bruce in the side room adjacent to the performance/DJ space. Heavy Sick is tiny. Two minuscule rooms side by side. Each about 1/3 the size of the Maxwells band room. But it did draw a nice amount of garage and rockabilly fans to hear Billy and Miriam play 45s. There was a rockabilly band that night called Los Rizlaz. Great fellows and a neat little band. They even did a few covers of Norton material in honor of the Millers. When Billy and Miriam hit the decks though the dance floor broke out. What was originally just a few people dancing turned into small enthusiastic group. When Miriam started dancing I couldn't help but join in. What was funny was that while Miriam and I enjoyed ourselves the younger set was decidedly more sedate. With proper coaxing though we did get some of the locals to let loose a little bit. After the show ended up with a rousing version of "Tallahasee Lassie" autographs and photo ops closed up the evening.

More pictures below!