Neil Hopcroft

Spiked in Yokohama
Wednesday was another Marshmallow Spike gig, this one down in Yokohama. We escaped the office early to meet up with some others at Shinagawa, but Dave was running late so just the three of us headed onward.

No word from Dave by the time we arrived at Kannai, so we left a map pinned to the noticeboard and a message on his phone….after a little random walking around the gridded roads we found the venue down some of the most dismal looking grey concrete stairs I’ve seen here, and there are a lot of dismal basements around. Clean, but somehow depressing. Inside the staff weren’t doing much to liven us up, but we all got in without too much confusion.

There was a band on when we arrived, who were almost entirely forgettable, noisy indie-punk without much character. Not bad, but not worth remembering the name of.

By the time MS were on the audience was mostly the gaijin contingent. The show was good again, MJs bass is so cool, sparkly and wrong handed.

After the show we waited for the band to clear and headed off to a restaurant before catching the train back to Shinagawa….I managed to catch the last train from Ebisu, which for some reason was finishing at Hiroo.

Hanabi
Then yesterday I met with Jamie, Zara and Josh to go and watch fireworks. We arrived late and the show had already started…we debated whether it was worth heading closer to the bay or staying somewhere where we could see some of the fire flowers. We found a place down in the infrastructural desert of Hinode where we could see most of them below the Yurikamome track.

It was structured as a competition between different manufacturers, each showing off their fireworks, launching from different islands on the bay (I assume, but couldn’t actually see from where I was), they took turns.

One of the sets was a series of shaped fireworks, with designs making up happy faces, hearts, mushrooms and a whole bunch of other shapes.

There was an unfortunate finale, with the tallest firework being interrupted by a train on the new transit line, causing a groan throughout the section of crowd we were standing in.

I figured out, just as the show was over, what was wrong. Fireworks are always associated with cold for me, since we only get them in November in Britain, it was 30C last night, so just not firework weather. Incidentally, I hear we’re in the middle of the longest heatwave ever to hit Tokyo (or something), 40 odd days over 30C.

We headed back to Jamies palace after the show, where Josh insisted we go rent Finding Nemo again, while at the video rental place we found a rack of cut price Jello Biafra CDs, with a collection of Alternative Tentacles disks from the early 90s for 300Yen each.

A bigger mess
Then on to Midnight Mess, at Cipango, a larger venue closer to the centre of Roppongi, meaning there were more guys trying to take us to their hostess bars on the way there. The place itself was a strange interpretation of glitzy 80s nightclubs, with a whole set of plaster palm trees and a scary sphynx with moons and hands and chicken heads.

Bizarrely the dancefloor was made of Tunbridgeware, but I couldn’t explain the pattern to Maya-chan.

Euthanasie were playing again, they were probably even better this time, then there was a statue, but he was quite dull[0], and another couple of bands.

Somehow the momentum of the evening was lost after the shows and I never really got dancing again. Which is probably as well, really, because I’m quite achey enough today as it is.

At the end of the night we were telling Maya-chan how we liked Euthanasie, so she dashed over and grabbed them so we could tell them ourselves….which was a little difficult, but they seemed happy to hear good news and gave us some CDs.

Of oysters and octupuses
And today I went to Shinjuku where I got a Felica reader, but the instructions are in Japanese and the Edy program can’t find the felica.dll, so can’t read from the card, and the Suica reader crashes during loading. Anyone know anything about Felica readers? Where can I get the SDK? I poked around on Sonys site but couldn’t find the SDK itself. Does it use standard 7816 command syntax, or is it another standard? Are these the same things as the London Transport cards?

[0] Did I ever tell you I met a statue in Oxford? She was dressed in white and was having trouble understanding the parking meter at the park and ride, so we got talking, which I somewhat regretted after I asked what she did for a living…I didn’t go out for lunch that day.