Basic Black

Lights and music in Kashiwa and Tokyo

Coming home to Kashiwa Station, I walk out onto the plaza to hear live music - it's time for 音街かしわ２００７, a weeklong music event hosted by Streetbreakers, a local arts group, featuring local musicians. This evening was a jazz trio doing standards, and tomorrow night is mostly solo acts from 5 to 7:30 pm at the east exit of the station.

Kashiwa has long been known for live music, starving artists, high school kids in need of practice, local characters and the ubiquitous two-boys-with-guitar. Kazuya can be found out there some weekends entertaining his loyal crowd of hopelessly single middle-aged ladies, fawning high school girls and assorted friends. It's a fun atmosphere.

Starting next week is the 20th Tokyo International Film Festival. Some things I want to see are Kari Skoglund's screen adaptation of Margaret Lawrence's novel The Stone Angel, Waltz (original title Valzer), a film about a day in the lives of hotel guests and staff shot in one sequence, and Eat and Run (Japanese title 真・女立喰師列伝) about crazy women bikers eating there way through various dangerous scenarios brought to you by the makers of Ghost in the Shell.

Tomorrow night Japan's Mille Miglia 2007 ends in Yokohama's Motomachi. Get this, they drove way out to Fukushima Prefecture a few days ago in a car rally with over 100 vintage cars, foreign and domestic.  Let's see if all of them come home.

The New Yorker Movie Night Thursdays

Enam, the bar man at the New Yorker, has been talking about events to draw more customers. The space is great - brick walls, hardwood, kitcshy Spam can garden on the wall, and a great big flat screen television with good stereo sound. I suggested a while back we do bring-your-own movie night. So Thursday, I dropped in with a copy of Beat Takeshi's 'Brother' (thank you to The Priest for that one), and the junior barman and I gasped at each bloodstained scene. Not the happiest movie to kick off the movie night, but great performances from not-so-famous players. Next week, I want to bring a fantasy film. It would be even more fun if there were more people. I figure we'll start at about 9pm on Thursdays. Lucky for me, home is a two minute shuffle from the bar.

An animated discussion

Last night, over dinner, we got talking about movies and shorts we'd seen on the Internet, whether Flash animation or live action fan films. The Philidelphian is uncanny - he'd watched something called Pulp Fantom, a mix of the latest Star Wars movie and Pulp Fiction, and entertained us with dialogue for a good 20 minutes. Wow, that guy can retain dialogue!

Some web-based sources recommended -  Ninjai: The Little Ninja, a fantasy about a child assassin on the road to revenge and answers, Broken Saints, a Flash animated graphic novel with evocative music, art and characters that draw you in, and TTCS has a list of classics such as All Your Base, Troops (a sendup of Star Wars based on Fox's reality television program "Cops") and Leonard Nimoy's Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.