japan - day 6, billy corgan & home

I ended up skipping tink tink (dammit) in favor of going to see billy corgan at a tokyo club. my interest was especially piqued because he had been quoted in some magazine or other saying that the dresden dolls had influenced his last record. what? ok, maybe. stranger things have happened. i know very little about the man and his music, other than seeing the smashing pumpkins open up for the chili peppers in 1991 (along with pearl jam, also then pretty much unknown - i touched eddie vedder's leg when he crowd surfed!! whoo!). one interesting thing about my musical history was the aparent bubble i unwittingly lived in during the nineties. i didn't really learn about nirvana until kurt cobain was dead and i never listened to the radio or watched MTV so i was (and still am, for the most part) completely clueless about most of the rock icons of the nineties. i see this as an advantage most of the time. at least i can still discover the best of it (when i finally bought Nevermind in 1999 i was like "holy shit! nobody told me this was GOOD!"). i continue to astound brian (and emily, especially, the true child of the nineties) with my ignorance. Stone Temple Pilots....they were a rap band, right?

no-one else was interested in coming, so emily and i arranged tickets and went off to see what Billy Corgan Solo looks like. and it looks very beautiful, turns out. the light show was a genius set of folding screens behind the minimal keyboard and drumpad band, whose instruments were encased in flowery, hand-welded art nouveau sculptures. for better or worse, the music blew my mind: it was as if someone had taken me and transported me to a random nightclub in 1983. it was not derivative...it was more like being in a sound museum. very mid-tempo, very joy division, very intense. every time mr. corgan looked in our direction, i felt bullet eyes piercing my brain. whatever kind of music he was playing, the guy had an unbelievable stage presence. afterwards we said hello and hung out for a minute or two, talking about japan and japanese culture. mr. billy corgan seems very deliberate, that's the best word i could come up with. a guy who has spent a lot of time thinking and working through and measuring carefully. turns out he had found out about the dolls through an agent we know who passed our disc along. things happen. they keep happening.

our last morning in tokyo i woke up early and wanted nothing more than to just be alone and soak up the last few moments. i took a long walk around our neighborhood and paid a visit to a nearby temple, where i sat in a chair for a while, half meditating and half watching the monks going through their rituals, and then took a walk through the cemetery. there were lilies in the garbage. i took one that wasn't too wilted.

13 hours on a flight to new york and then a 3 hour layover and 2 hour delayed flight to boston.
i watched the wizard of oz (cried four times, mostly towards the beginning) and million dollar baby for the second time this month (cried twice). flying means there are a lot of movies. i never used to see any of them, now i am in touch with the culture.

home.
there are no lights on in my apartment. the power is out. go downstairs, where pope and zea are still up working. do you know why the power is out? lightning? ok., fair enough. go back upstairs, head for bed. there are british people in my bed. go back downstairs. do you guys know why there are british people in my bed? houseguests of lee (our benevolent landlord). ok. where's lee? in the hospital, with a terrible flu. ok. is there beer? yes. time to drink some. i try to explain, sitting on the stoop drinking beer, the double mindfuck feeling of not only seeing your apartment in the complete darkness when your'e not used to it, but also being able to vaguely make out the foreign-shaped belongings of strange surprise british houseguests. i see something on my kitchen table that doesn't live there, but i can't really see what it is. foreign amorphous objects in the bathroom. all will be revealed tomorrow, when the sun comes up. for now i am camping out in lee's bed upstairs and finding comfort in the familiar glow of my mac, which is one of the only sources of stability in my life lately. i awoke the strange birtish couple. no, no! stay in bed, you look very comfortable. we'll meet tomorrow and in the meantime, keep sleeping. good night.

morning.
i am home again. i am happy. already i have drank three cups of tea and played the piano and gone to my yoga studio and sweated my brains out. the piano is like an anti-magnet but i did finish one song that's been bouncing around in my head for the better part of a year now, and it represents a real milestone for me because i actually finished the lyrics On The Airplane, which means On Tour, which means Away From Home which I can traditionally Never Do. So maybe now i can creep out of my nasty habit shell and actually start writing a little more on the road. i can only finish writing lyrics when the song is more or less finished in my head and i just need words combined together and filling in blanks, but it's a start. music is all in my head, it's not in my fingers and i need to remember that i can do whatever i want. i'm honestly like fucking rainman when it comes to songwriting. i need to cure myself.

currently listening to spiritualized (ladies and gentleman we are floating in space), i forgot how brilliant that music is for calming nerves, and it's starting to feel a little tiny bit like fall, so i put on my Nad Navillus CD (iron night) which is one my favorite fall CDs of all time, to, like, kind of prepare for fall coming. so i'm not surprised. fall always scares me a little. because then comes the winter. anyway.