MaXtreme Snowboarding X

So yes, against my physical disposition, and against my God given instincts I went snowboarding for the first time on Sunday. And of course I was lucky that I went along because I had a great time in spite of my cold, and in spite of the terrible, torturous, muscle pain that has afflicted me ever since.

I’m laying it on a bit thick, but thanks to the use of muscles that my body has never required before, and then perhaps… possibly drinking too much at Chris’s Flatwarming party, I felt today like I had been hit – not only by a truck – but by a truck filled with booze.

Gah.


Seriously, about those muscles, I’m pretty concerned. It’s good to get fit, and work out parts of your body that don’t normally get exercise; but the human body didn’t evolve to staple its feet to a plank of wood and hurtle down a hill. I’m not saying that the activity itself is unnatural, I’m just wondering if we might be developing parts of our bodies that aren’t really required in any other activity. I keep thinking of Frank Zappa’s high school pal who found the guide to muscles of the body and set about developing all the unnecessary ones, until he was a total freak. Then again I guess the proliferation of hot snowboarders out there should pretty much set my mind at ease.

The muscles that take the most abuse, of course, are your arms because you’re having to push yourself up every time you fall over. And for me that was pretty much every time. I had the hang of keeping myself upright for the most part by the end of the day, and could descend in one way or another, but my moments of perfect execution were few and far between. After I had the hang of sort of shuffling from side to side, I tried angling myself a little more directly down the hill. The speed was amazing, but I could only stop by falling over. Which, y’know… works. Ow.

Picking things up wasn’t actually as grindingly frustrating as I’d thought. Thanks to my teachers (Olivia & Sara, take a bow) and a pretty steep learning curve, I found that actually staying on your feet in the snow, which at first seems impossible, actually came pretty quickly. Also I was told things were tricky for me because of my high centre of gravity, I really had to crouch down for control sometimes. Gravity: my closest friend, my most vicious enemy. And if only that was the first time I’d had to use that sentence.

The other thing about snowboarding, or skiing even, is that it's worth it for the view alone. Seriously, somebody put a lift into the side of that mountain so you can go all the way to the top and take a look. Now all you've got to do is get back down without killing yourself. Oh wait, we're going to stick your feet to this carbon fibre board too. Off you go.

Tips for first time snowboarders:

From Yoko – keep some chocolates in your pocket. This didn’t sound so useful at first, but man I wish I’d had something up there to keep my blood-sugar up, because I must’ve sugar-crashed half a dozen times.

Bend your legs. No, more. More.

You don’t get bonus points for taking out kids. In fact, apparently you don’t get any points for taking out anyone. I’m not sure where I got that idea from, but I was pretty disappointed. Back to throwing bricks at skateboarders I guess.

Let's have a look in Alex's cupboard!

So the good thing about living in Japan is how easy it is to eat healthily, and maintain a balanced and nutritious diet. What with all the rice, fish and vegetables, it's almost as easy to cover all the important food groups as it is to slip on the ice and fall on your ass here in Sapporo. Just take a look at what I found when I cleared out my one, tiny kitchen cupboard:


Chocolate covered coffee beans

Royce Creamy Milk Chocolate Bar

Sparx Magic Colour Changing Popping Candy

Bag of Watagashi (four individually bagged portions of candy floss)

Two small bags of Doctor Who marshmallows

Boiled Strawberry Lollipop

Gummy Hotdog

Peanuts Christmas Hot Chocolate Sachet

Mike Popcorn (actually the best bagged popcorn in the world)

Gummy Bears

Nesquik Magic Straws

Two bottles of Reese's Peanut Butter Ice Cream Topping

Mentoes

Glico hard toffees

...and an unusually detailed chocolate model of a chimpanzee.

...

What? There was some rice and some instant cup noodles in there too.

Snow Festival Prelude / My Part In Its Downfall

Sapporo’s internationally, globally, world famous Snow Festival kicked off this morning with an opening ceremony that featured “Miss ~ from all over Japan”. I haven’t been down to check it out yet, and I’ll have to live with the disappointment of missing that cavalcade of lovelies, but I can at least bring you news from the build up last weekend.

Sapporo Snow Festival apparently attracts over two million visitors a year. Sapporo is a city of around one point seven million people. Now I’ve expressed scepticism about this in the past, but here I’m going to go right out and call shenanigans here. Where the hell could we possibly fit all those people? Today someone said “Yes, but Sapporo does have a lot of hotels”, which is true, but does it have a hotel district BIGGER THAN THE REST OF THE CITY? Christ on a bike.

I was in town on Saturday and Sunday though, and the large number of tourists was pretty apparent. It’s not like I’m the only Caucasian in the city here, but certainly I don’t see all that many white folks in my average week. This weekend there were loads of them as soon as I got off the train. And while there’s a natural snobbishness (that I’m not going to deny) that you get about any city in which you live, it really didn’t bother me all that much. UNTIL that is, I was in a tiny, tiny vintage shop where the woman at the counter asked me in Japanese if I was in town for the Snow Festival. Putting aside the fact that if I were in town for the Snow Festival I probably wouldn’t have understood her, I replied “No… I live here” in a kind of crestfallen way. Oh well, it was an awesome shop, and the whole time I was in there she seemed to be giving a Ukulele lesson to another woman who was standing at the counter. Seriously.

On any other day that would’ve easily won the day’s medal for best shop, but I also managed to stumble upon a bookshop that sold both new and ancient, second hand children’s books, art and design books, fabulous stationery and a bunch of other things. The shop was on the third floor of some no-mark building off the beaten track, and I talked to the owner for ages, as he had excellent English from working in New York for two years as a butcher (!). His stock was endlessly fascinating, and I should probably write a whole piece sometime about the appetite for travel and assimilation of western culture that allows you to strike up long conversations with Japanese people in a way that foreign nationals never could in the UK or America. I also bought a phenomenally cool mechanical pencil from the Czech Republic. Sweet!

Wait… I was going to talk about the Snow Festival I think. So even more awesome than going shopping was the fact that I got to help out with Jesi’s Snow Sculpture, which was one of the small blocks of snow that they allocate to the citizens of Sapporo. There are 120 citizens sculptures altogether, and they are raffled off to people from a list of 600 entrants. Of course most teams consist of half a dozen members, and they all enter in order to secure a block. Jesi entered all on her own and scored spot number 112 of 120. I helped out for maybe three hours in total, and frankly I take little pride in it, as both times I only actually turned up to apologise in person for not helping out, only to actually end up helping out. Still, check out all the pictures; those wrists and the drumstick in his right hand… all me baby. It was fun, and we felt a little special as we got a lot of double takes from Japanese people who didn’t expect to see any foreign people making snow sculptures. The only other foreign non-pros that I saw were the US NAVY team. Our sculpture was better than theirs.

A massive number of citizen’s sculptures are cartoon characters and company mascots, which is really very sensible since those characters are mostly large blobs with other blobs attached. A pretty safe bet for snow sculpting. They have to open up some of the blocks of the park to allow the citizens to get access to their sculptures, so I probably saw most of the big statues last weekend and they’re all pretty cool. I’ll be going down again in the next couple of days to have a proper look, but as everyone says – it will be very cold, there will be too many people, and I will catch flu and die. My question for all of my students this week is “Are you going to the Snow Festival” to which the answer is 95% NO. For the people of Sapporo this whole thing is just a week long inconvenience.

Lets knock this on the head with my favourite Snow Festival trivia right now.

Firstly while the main Snow Festival site is in Odori Park, the park that runs for a dozen city blocks across the centre of the city, the big sculptures are actually placed carefully slightly to the west. This is because there’s an underground mall to the east of the park, and the massive weight of a large snow sculpture would crash through the ceiling and destroy the wonder that is Aurora Town.

Secondly the Snow Festival is actually smaller now than it was a few years ago, not just because they’ve had a run of years with poor snow, but because of Japan’s increased military presence on the global stage. Apparently the Hokkaido SDF base sent troops to Iraq a few years ago, and as the SDF has always been one of the main contributors to the Snow Festival there were suddenly less people to make the massive sculptures. Is it shallow to make a joke about that being yet another reason to hate the war in Iraq?

Yes, it is

New York London Paris Munich, everybody talk about...

So like I said, it sounds like I can make A MILLION DOLLARS through one of these blog things, so I'm going to try and be a little more forthcoming. Here's some content!

monobright 20th Century Lover's Orchestra
Uploaded by ueto

Notes:

1: No they're not all the same person, they've just got that whole "21st Century Group Sounds" thing going on. The drummer and the guitarist do look remarkably similar though. And I'm pretty sure the guitarist's caucasian twin plays in Bloc Party.

2. Yes, he does open his mouth very wide when he sings doesn't he?

3. That's really a pretty cheap video. I like the bit where he steps off the crane platform.

Wonders of the Zooniverse

On Monday we took a very snowy drive to Asahikawa to go to Asahiyama Zoo! I'll spare you the suspense, it was pretty awesome.

Like any good liberal, middle-class boy before my trip I was conscious that zoos are probably a barbaric, outdated form of entertainment - akin to badger baiting, bull fighting and shooting Belgians. However Asahiyama Zoo is a pretty serious proposition, and it turns out that all the animal enclosures are meticulously designed to be as satisfying a prison as any beast could hope to be confined in. For example they know that seals like to swim in large vertical loops in the wild, so they design their pool to be very deep, with vertical tubes for them to swim through. All the animals seemed pretty content, even when wandering in the snow, except for the monkeys, who looked to be thoroughly miserable out in the cold.

Oh coz it snowed a lot! It has been snowing quite a lot here in general, so there's a covering everywhere and big piles where it's built up. It's getting pretty cool and we had to drive through a few blizzards to make the two hour trip up the highway. On a side note Japanese highway tolls are steep! About 15 quid each way for that two hour cruise! Yowzer! The zoo is only open for a limited time every day in the winter because the weather is too cold for most of the animals, so they only let them out for some fresh air for a few hours. We missed the hippo, coz he only comes out for an hour a day. But part of the joy was seeing some of the animals pad around in the snow, certainly the tiger seemed particularly incongruous. Others like the penguins and polar bears of course are probably pretty smug. Here were some of the highlights:


The polar bears were awesome. Not much more too say about them, but I took some nice photos so check it out. One of them was swimming endless laps which was probably a good idea since it was -6C above the surface. By the way "bears underwater" are one of those things like swan boats that you can't take a bad picture of.


The penguins were, y'know, penguins. Cute and all. There was a baby one that was pretty much the size of a regular penguin but with brown fur, he looked like a sulky teen. And once a day they lead the penguins on a "march" (I know) around the zoo to give them some excercise. We saw them coming home, I have to admit it was pretty sweet.


The lions, tigers, panther and leopards were all great. Their cages backed onto each other, and the big male lion was right at the back of his pen pacing backwards and forwards eyeing the tigers malevolently. The tigers were prowling, y'know, taking no notice.

"It's like my lunch is in a microwave and the door is jammed shut."

I probably haven't been to a proper zoo since I was a kid, so it was an odd experience, and yes slightly awing to see a lot of these animals. When you see a tiger strolling past a few feet from the (hopefully reinforced) plexi-glass partition, you get this sort of feeling of muscle and sinew and teeth and claws that gives you a sensation somewhat akin to being a steak. And frankly I can see how, left unchecked, that feeling could expand, leading you to buy XXL silver on black t-shirts and airbrushed poster prints entitled "Lord of the Savannah".

The other thoughts that you often entertain are, of course, "Could I take this animal in a fight?" Lions, Tigers, Bears? Hell no. Lesser Big Cats? I'd like to think I could give a fair account of myself (opposable thumbs, some sort of improvised weapon). Seals? On land sure, under water they'd probably have me. Deer? I reckon so. Penguins? Piece of piss. Simians? Um...

I found the simians unnerving. For a start when I was a kid I heard that an adult male orangutan has enough upper body strength to pull your arms off like you were Mr Potatohead. That sort of thing stays with you, so there was nowhere near enough bars between the orangutan family and me, partly because there were no bars between us. The orangutans lived in a network of branches, ropes and bars at the top of a vast, cavernous room, presumably far enough back that they can't launch themselves onto you if you start throwing batteries at them or something. Still, I was a little spooked.

Like I said I felt sorry for the monkeys, but the chimpanzees? Those things are just sinister. For some reason they look more like devolved humans than evolved apes, and they all have patchy fur with disturbingly human physiology underneath. And creepy eyes.

What else? Red Pandas are of course the second cutest animal in the world (after chinchillas) so they were very popular. The zoo had set up a crazily unsafe looking panda foot bridge over the pedestrians so that the little bears could peer down on the crowds cooing up at them. Nothing to stop them from dropping off into the mob, but then they're pretty docile looking things. They're in the "No Problem" column of my earlier list. Seals are pretty cool, but not as cute as you think. They're like big, greasy sausages that can only move themselves outside water by crudely jerking themselves like a clinically obese boy who just suffered a stroke. Underwater they're like fucking tubby torpedos though.

"We're sort of recreating Temple of Doom with pandas instead of people, and people instead of crocodiles. It's a think piece."

All in all a great day! And I walked away with nary a trace of liberal guilt! So bascially I might be an arsehole, but I'm an arsehole who likes Asahiyama Zoo, and I can't wait to go back in the summer! Hippos!

2007 Ain't Nuthin' But Meat! Best Albums Ne?

Taking time out of my busy schedule posting stuff about Japan here, so please indulge me. Bills had his up good and early, but y'know better late than never, here are my best albums of 2007 (there's some J-Pop in there to keep it a little topcal too).

Oh but let’s get this out of the way first:

Battles, Panda Bear and Deerhunter are NOT VERY GOOD.

None of them are terrible, but I expected to be blown away by all three after reading so many good things only to find all of them… middling? Uninspiring? Kinda crappy? People were calling “Atlas” single of the year, the future of music etc. Really? The future of music is novelty math-rock? I guess it’s a fairly original field to work in but I’m gonna stick my neck out and predict that not everything in the future will sound like a rockin’ pre-school TV theme. I know, I know, going by the many, many bloggers out there I’m clearly outvoted on these three, but well… I’m right and everyone else is wrong. Sorry about that, but you know, it was going to come out in the end.

For 2006 I just couldn’t put together a top 10 favourite albums, there just hadn’t been enough that I loved. 2007 however was just chock-a-lockin’ with good to great albums that I loved through and through. Still, digging through the billion and one best of 2007 lists on the internet I feel fairly aggrieved that a bunch of my choices aren’t mentioned more often. How can bands like Melt-Banana still remain criminally underground in a world with the internet? Whatever, looking at this list now it seems my musical taste is skewing more and more towards the louder, more obnoxious end of the spectrum, and frankly I’m glad about that.

- - -

First please commence opening wide for the Annotated Top Ten!

Liars – Liars

Where do you go from a rhythmical, noise-rock exploration of the ego/id struggle? To songs! Genius! I’m pretty sure that Liars are one of the best bands in the world right now.

Melt-Banana – Bambi’s Dilemma

Finding a prickly, fruitful, middle ground between the longer tracks on their last-album Cell-Scape, and the spastic thirty-second tracks that they started off with. Frantic!

Future of the Left – Curses!

I got the Japanese edition with BONUS TRACKS! JAPANESE BONUS TRACKS! That I’m pretty sure you can download off itunes everywhere else in the world, but still.

Black Francis – Bluefinger

Oh whatever. I still can’t see why people don’t love Frank Black, and certainly I’m certain now that I prefer his solo stuff to the Pixies, but his last three albums have pushed even my patience. Back to the rock here, I was just so, so happy. You can’t imagine how happy. I’m serious, I probably cried. Then again I’m crying at anything right now, so that’s not so remarkable.

Radiohead – In Rainbows

Because, yeah! It’s really fucking good!

Saul Williams – The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust

I guess I didn’t listen to much hip-hop this year, and this is a sort of cross-genre thing anyway. But still that makes two phenomenal albums that you could download off the internet for free last year.

Dan Deacon – Spiderman of the Rings

You’ve got to get past the fact that it’s REALLY annoying at first, coz before long this sounds like the electro version of a strange child on the sugar-high of a lifetime. It’s one big Technicolor Smile/Hug!

Marnie Stern – In Advance of the Broken Arm

I can’t believe this didn’t show up in more end of the year lists. One woman, a whole lot of crazy guitars, and a gonzo-octopus drummer. But really interesting songs, that was the kicker for me.

Shellac – Excellent Italian Greyhound

A while after this came out I thought of it as being uneven but full of great moments. But when I listened back to it recently it was just awesome through and through.

Nina Nastastia and Jim White – You Follow Me

Not as good as her last solo album On Leaving, this was still almost perfect. It takes quite some drumming to make a song sound more spacious than it would have with only guitar.

- - -

But it didn’t stop there! Here’s some more great albums that I loved, but that weren’t quite in the top ten:

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Ire Works

Might’ve slugged something out of the top ten, but I’ve only just started listening to it. It’s pretty incredible, but for me The Dillinger Escape Plan will always be labouring in the shadow of the Irony is a Dead Scene EP, which is probably THE BEST rock recording of the last ten years. Sorry, I like telling people that. Coz it’s true.

Yourcodenameis:Milo – They Came From The Sun

Who have now broken up? That sucks, but I’m glad I saw them live last year because at that gig they finally lived up to everything I hoped they could be. They never quite did it on record.

Charlotte Hatherley – The Deep Blue

Really great throughout, but I can’t help but love the fast songs more. She’s just so good at them!

Les Savy Fav – Let’s Stay Friends

Just didn’t quite blow me away like some of their other stuff. Still amazing, and I’m sure they’re still the best live band in the world.

Travis Morrison Hellfighters – All Y’all

Again, when you make one of the best albums ever with your former band you’ve got a lot to live up to. I really thought this was a great album, but… man it ain’t The Plan.

Tokyo Jihen – Variety

The J-Pop release that I picked up the day it came out. Really smart, urbane, rocky, guitar pop played with phenomenal skill by a great band, fronted by a great singer. The songs are unpredictably good, and the execution is just flawless. When a gibberish bass-break sounds awesome, you know that you’re dealing with professionals.

Carina Round – Slow Motion Addict

Is this even out in the UK yet? It’s pretty great, even if she is all up in LA sniffing coke off solid gold yetis or whatever. That “doot-do-do-do-do” hook in Down Slow is awesomely smart.

Winter Vacation with the Bear Jamboree

Chris assured me that Jamborees are generally associated with Bears, hence the post title. I'm sceptical, but then I often am and I try not to let it get in the way of a good Jamboree.

Chris came all the way from England for the New Year's Holiday, and boy did we have a high old time! Here are some photographs... prose photographs that is! And some real photos too, to stop you rioting. Because God knows that reading on it's own is just no fun.

Oh boy.

Adrienne Yoder is awesome for letting us crash in her appartment in Tokyo while she was out of town. Adrienne! You're the best! Tokyo was positively tropical compared to Sapporo, every day was balmy and mild punctuated by blinding sunshine.

Oh, but I plain don't like Tokyo very much. Sightseeing and looking around the city requires frequent train hops and transfers that are just not quirky or interesting no matter how you cut it. And with Chris's jet lag and my general tiredness we fell asleep on every other train just like seasoned Tokyo-ites. About half the people in every carriage of every train are asleep at any one given time, the trains are so warm, and their gentle swaying is so lulling... you just... can't help...


Anyway, we climbed skyscrapers for the bird's eye view of the Blade Runner skyline; we spent half a day in guitar shops looking at ancient equipment and Japanese made pedals with controls like "Speed", "Duty", "All", "Rave" and "Night"; we bought obscene amounts of cheap CDs; we went to Shrines and Temples where they were hammering up floodlights and hammering down heavy duty flooring to cope with the thousands and thousands of people expected on New Year's night; we went to extremely expensive shops and extremely cheap shops; and we ate quickly and conveniently, which seems to be the best I can do in Tokyo.

Chris meets guitar pedal armageddon in an Ochanomizu guitar shop.

Meiji Jingu, my favourite place in Tokyo.

On the plane back to Sapporo we were the only foreign people on board, so when the stewardess made her announcements in Japanese AND English we really HAD to listen, because it was pretty much for our benefit.

Back in Sapporo we spent New Year's Eve with the fabulous Yuka, and the equally amazing Katsuhiko, eating great food, watching a sort of J-Pop / Enka all star revue (that brough Chris, all too cruelly up to speed with Japanese pop music, and the joys of SMAP), and finally facing minus-five-ish temperatures to visit Hokkaido Shrine and throw a coin for luck in the New Year. Oh, also we ate Soba noodles just before midnight, long noodles for a long life.

People purifying themselves with water at Hokkaido Jingu on New Year's Day at 2am. Note icicles on the right hand gutter. It was cold as balls.

The next couple of days featured lots of snow, shopping, walking and Chris being fed lots of (hopefully) awesome food. Soup curry, a general izakaya buffet, okonomiyaki and finally sushi. What can I say, the food here is fucking GREAT. The highlight of MY week was meeting the chairman and owner of the Fugetsu chain of okonomiyaki restaurants in a crowded, smoky, fourth floor eatery. His cartoon avatar appears all over every store, and it was a genuine thrill to actually meet him in the flesh. And, I don't want to be asinine, but he looked exactly like a Japanese Bob Hoskins. Which is transcendentally awesome. I wish, I wish, I wish I had got a photo taken with him.

Of course we did plenty of other amazing, fabulous, exotic things which I haven't the time to go into here. But y'know everyone's invited.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!