JAPAN ONE
It’s taken a while to process what was going on during my recent trip to Japan. For a while, all I had was a wealth of powerful but disjointed images – Tokyo in the rush-hour, sitting smoking on a rooftop watching the crows circle and the cats sleeping on sunlit roofs below, the awesome spectacle of Mt. Fuji from the bullet train, the soaring neon of pachinko palaces like a cardio-vascular monitor for Godzilla, getting my first acupuncture from a guy who knew Wilko Johnson, but not really understanding it. Then I started to realize that what I ‘d accomplished was to at least rise to meet a challenge the extent which I still wasn’t really grasping. On my previous excursion I had been with the 1999 incarnation of the Deviants – Andy Colquhoun, Rick Parnell and Doug Lunn. It had been an experience and a whole lotta fun. This time round I was going totally on my own, and the ramifications of that were greater than I’d realized, even as I boarded the outward bound JAL flight from LAX.

A band provides it own capsulized sense of self, of nationality and identity. The experiences, the highs and the problems are shared. You are all inside looking out, cocooned in a common language, individual familiarity, Monty Python jokes and where’s-the-beer? You provide your own filter on the alien environment. To paraphrase Bono, Outside Is Tokyo – but inside is the Deviants making the best of it. To go out and perform solo, somewhere were you may not be able to communicate verbally is something completely different.

In an Osaka Hotel room, I watch a Russian production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, in Russian with Japanese subtitles.

There’s been an awful lot of nonsense talked over the years about the common language of rock & roll, and, indeed, I’ve talked a who lot of it myself. Suddenly I was in a situation in which it had to be true or I was done for. Of course, the musicians in Ken Matsutani’s band Marble Sheep plus guitarist Nabeji had done their homework in spades. Ken had wanted to play some of the old tunes, and, while not adverse to the idea and happy to go along, there was no way that could perform material that I had written thirty five years ago that same as it was on 1968. The metaphor for rehearsal was that where once the song had been that of a young man’s desperation to get laid, it was now an old man’s song about maybe getting laid one last time. Tempo was made more determined. I would have liked to have said like Lee Marvin’s relentless and dealy footfalls in Point Blank. Perhaps that was too much of a stretch, but the message got through, and all was eminently clear, including how rock & roll music really was means of communication that needed little verbal augmentation. Suddenly my Japanese friends and I were even evolving our own cross-language catch phrases. One of the new lines that I invented for the 2004 version of the 1967 tune "I’m Coming Home" was "I have the key to the masterlock". Nabeji would grin at me across his red Fender. "We have the key to the masterlock" and we fucking knew we did.

But was the idea of reading poetry on my own in Tokyo to anyone who paid and cared to listen pushing the envelope a little far? Hubris? Insanity? For that you’ll have to wait for the next instalment.

The secret word is Arigato.

RED TAILED HAWK UPDATE
Seems that the National Audubon Society are suing 927 Fifth Avenue to get Pale Male and his family their nest back. How the homeless hawks are faring has not been reported.

AND...
A great piece by Frank Rich on the movie Kinsey and more Christian fascist fuss.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=19053&mode=nested&order=0