It started Thursday night when DJ Shadow, Keb Darge, and Dante came through Nagoya with their special brand of Deep Funk.
They played a really small, underground club called JB's, and the majority of the audience were Europeans working at the Aichi Expo. It's the first time I've been to a concert in Japan where the foreigners outnumbered the Japanese and I couldn't see over everyone's head.
Rather than each DJ playing their own set, it was an all at once, triple tag-team, onslaught of what Shadow called 'body movin music.' The tiny club heated up like a sauna while they spun lots of 60s and 70s funk on vinyl 45s.
On of the funkiest Nagoya nights on record!
Keb Darge
Our posse
Scary Will
James
Hey!The very next day I went with a group of friends to the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art to see a Kenji Yanobe exhibit titled Kindergarten.
Kenji Yanobe is a native of Osaka and creative brain-child of the fabled Expo '70. He created Kindergarten to put a cheeky twist on the current Aichi Expo's theme of Nature's Wisdom... adding an apocalyptic twist.
7.5 meter tall robot
Rocking Mammoth
Tora-yan
The day after that I hosted a small private BBQ party at my house for some close friends. It was a pretty relaxing day cooking meat until about midnight when a large group of JET teachers came over and we started blasting music and watching DVDs.
I introduced them to a really crazy Japanese band called Hifana, which is kind of like if Future Man from the Flecktones was crossed with Mix Master Mike, multiplied by two, and had a dash of Japanese thrown into the jumble for good measure. Later I cranked out the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots 5.1 at full volume and blew out my center channel!
I polished off the already great weekend by going into Nagoya Sunday afternoon to see a special screening of a Japanese documentary film called Tentsuku 107+1.
Simply put, it was about a group of people in Okinawa trying to make positive impact on their local surroundings by completing three projects: 1) raising a town's awareness of solid waste management, 2) knitting a 1km long rainbow scarf for children in Afghanistan, and 3) rowing a canoe from Okinawa all the way to Kagoshima.
This was the first time for the film to be seen with English subtitles so foreigners could understand and enjoy it, but it was also cool because it was shown in a Rakugo theater behind a Shinto shrine.
Rokugo TheaterI can't say enough good things about last weekend. It left me feeling funky, artsy, noisy, and pro-active. All the things I truly enjoy in life.
