My wife and I just returned from our 2015 trip to Tokyo and Sapporo. I've got a few things to write specifically about, but here are a couple general thoughts about Japan right now, and this trip:
For the first time in a while, I was actually kind of glad to be home. Part of it's that we've sort of run out of new things to do there, and maybe the novelty of Japan itself is finally wearing off a bit for me (after 15 years!). It's just a regular place to me now, and that makes its little annoyances (which I've always recognized but usually ignore) a little harder to deal with.
Japan seems to be searching for the next big thing. Usually when we visit, there are one or two things in pop culture that have captured everybody's imagination (or at least that the media wants you to think have done so). Things that get popular there are everywhere; you can't escape them. But this time, there was no one thing that everyone was listening to, or watching, or buying. It felt like something was missing to me. It made everything on TV, on billboards or whatever feel really random, like there was nothing tying anything together.
Japan has once again literally made me sick. I have at least a cold; we'll see if it gets worse. This happens about half the times I visit. I realized this time that it's probably the sub-tropical climate; even in October it's very humid and "moist" in Tokyo, which is probably why so many people in Japan seem to be sick all the time. Once I actually got Swine Flu there - I'm not joking.
Of course we did do some fun stuff. I'm a little spoiled by past visits, which have been some of the best memories of my life. Here are a few of the things I know I'm going to write about:
Flying first class on ANA.
Riding the Cassiopeia night train to Sapporo.
SCANDAL concert.
Yen Town Band (Chara) concert, and I'll probably talk some about "live house" shows in Japan in general in this post.
Something something FOOD. Not sure what angle to take here, especially since we repeated a lot of restaurants I've written about already. But food is always one of the highlights so I gotta bring it up somehow.
Odaiba. I've written about it before but this was the first time we stayed there and actually spent most of our time there.
Hopefully it doesn't take me a month to get to everything.
It's almost time for what's usually my favorite part of the year... Japan trip!
After so many visits, my wife and I are really starting to run out of things to do in Tokyo. We've gone to other cities, but speaking for myself, at least, I just never have as much fun anywhere else. But this year, the big centerpiece of the trip is going to be a ride on the Cassiopeia from Tokyo to Sapporo - this train is the last of a breed, a luxury night train with dining car service. And this is our last chance to take it - it'll be discontinued next spring. (I previously mentioned my attempts to ride the Twilight Express before it was withdrawn - well, this time we actually have tickets. This is happening!)
So, Sapporo - not even sure yet what we'll do there, but they do have a beer museum and garden. We can go and pretend to be interested in the history of Sapporo beer, then get drunk for cheap!
In fact, this has been one of our more last-minute trip plans - and we still don't have a lot of full days. We've got a couple concerts to go to (probably do some show reports when I get back!), the short Sapporo side trip, probably do some guitar shopping, and... not sure what else. We're staying in Odaiba this time, which I've always wanted to do - land of giant ferris wheels, VR theme parks, retro shopping malls and the best ramen in the world. So I'll probably do all that again too. Cool thing is we can also walk to both of the concerts we've got tickets to! (They're at Zepp Tokyo and Zepp Diver City Tokyo.) And I'll get to see the full-size Gundam on the way to the latter.
I'm sure I'll do some work stuff there too - every trip there now is a business trip.
We had enough miles on ANA this time to fly out first class, so I'll definitely be reporting on that! (We're flying economy coming back.) I've never flown international first class before, so I'm looking forward to it. Coming back in economy is going to be a huge letdown, I'm sure - it's already depressing enough to leave Japan, much less being crammed in a tiny seat with a screaming baby right next to us. (Oh, it's going to happen - it always does.)
I'm mad. What you are looking at is my fourth flat tire in the 14 months or so that my wife and I have been leasing our 2014 Mini Cooper. At some point, it stops being an accident and starts being the car's fault. This just ain't right.
New Mini Coopers and even most regular BMW's come with run-flat tires standard - in fact, for the Mini, at least, there is no other option. (Or at least there wasn't when we ordered ours.) I finally figured out why with this flat tire, which was the first one to really hit 0 PSI and the first that had us calling up roadside assistance because of the horrible crunching noise that driving on it produced. It doesn't sound or feel much different than driving on any other flat. It's extremely disconcerting. It feels wrong, and like you're going to be shooting sparks any second.
Roadside assistance cheerfully told us that the two options we had were to drive it as it was, or to get ourselves towed - at our expense - to the nearest dealer. This despite the fact that our non-S Mini Cooper actually does have a spare tire - a fact that I know from actually looking at it and asking the dealer "is that a spare tire?", not that you'd ever know from reading the manual, which has no useful information on the subject whatsoever. (Sadly, the foresight to look up things on the internet like "how to remove the spare tire" and "where to place the jack" prior to actually needing to know eluded me.)
It finally dawned on me that the run-flats are a way to keep BMW from having to send someone out to change tires. It's a cost-cutting scam that's now literally cost me $1,000 and one very unsafe trip home driving through the streets of Manhattan, over the Williamsburgh Bridge and through Brooklyn and Queens on a flat tire.
See, I've discovered that the big problem with run-flats is that they would rather be flat than filled with air. I have never had a flat tire on any other car I've owned. It's just not something that I think of as possible, or at least it's something that happens to people with old tires who don't fill them properly. I'm a tire maintenance freak; I check and maintain air pressure religiously, and with any little strange noise I will replace a tire. So four flat tires in 14 months on the same car means the tires are physically defective. This just should not happen.
I don't know how this isn't national news, to be honest. Every time I've gone to the dealer, every single person in the room seems to be asking their service adviser what's wrong with their tires. I don't think I've heard anyone have a problem other than a flat tire - and usually it's not their first.
This is singlehandedly going to keep me from buying another BMW/Mini.
It's also convinced me not to lease anymore either. If I wanted to replace all four tires, I'd have to do it from a Mini-approved list, the cheapest of which is about $175.
Been almost a week(!), but above is some video I shot at the Foo Fighters' recent show at Citi Field on July 15.
I've been a Foo Fighters fan since the beginning - I still remember the video debut for "Big Me", and I actually came home from work early so I could watch premiere of "I'll Stick Around" back in 1995. (I was a Nirvana fan before.) That first album's still great, but it was "The Colour and the Shape" that sounded as if it was speaking directly to me and what I was going through myself at the time. Since then I've felt like Dave's a brother of mine. If I have a current rock idol, someone I try to emulate myself, it's Dave Grohl.
But this was my first-ever Foo Fighters show. I was a little embarrassed when Dave called out the first-timers in the crowd by sarcastically saying "we've only had a band for like 20 years, but you know, it's cool." I can't believe it's been that long.
The Foos had a pop-up store in the Lower East Side of Manhattan that happened to be only a couple blocks from the store my wife and I own. So we went for the whole experience, buying all of our merchandise there first.
My wife outside Citi Field in her "Broken Leg Tour" t-shirt.
The front of that shirt - I bought one too. Not that Dave could really hide the fact that he's got a pretty horridly broken leg, but he's embraced it fully on this tour, maybe even to the point of excess. To be honest, the first time I saw his now-famous stage throne, I threw up a little in my mouth. It seemed so pretentious. I would have preferred something a little more understated... like maybe this IKEA chair. He did joke about it (he called it "ridiculous" even though he designed it himself), and gave a full PowerPoint presentation on his leg break and the throne's creation.
That's Dave in the hospital on the monitors, during his slide show. And on his throne in real life.
Here's the set list for the show (from setlist.fm - I removed all the snippets and extraneous stuff):
Everlong
Monkey Wrench
Learn to Fly
Something From Nothing
The Pretender
Up in Arms
Congregation
Walk
Cold Day in the Sun
My Hero (Acoustic)
Times Like These (Acoustic)
Under Pressure (Queen & David Bowie cover)
Let There Be Rock (AC/DC cover)
All My Life
These Days
Outside
Breakout
Next to You (The Police cover)
This Is a Call
White Limo
Arlandria
Breakdown (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers cover)
Best of You
Encore:
Stay With Me (Faces cover) (with Chad Smith) (Taylor Hawkins on lead vocals)
It was a good set. They've got a lot of great songs so no one is ever going to be 100% satisfied, but it hit all the necessary notes and threw in a few surprises. My one little disappointment was a cover they didn't play - I know at previous shows they had played "Tom Sawyer" by Rush, but at Citi Field they replaced it with "Next to You". (Dave let us n00bs know that the Foo Fighters are the "world's highest paid cover band.")
I'm usually not a fan of acoustic stuff at rock shows but one of the highlights on this tour has to be "My Hero", the chorus of which Dave sits back and lets the crowd sing to him. And it's pretty clear that we are all singing it to him. (Just listen to it in the video above.) Say what you want, the man deserves it. His leg's shattered in a million friggin' pieces, and he's coming out there every night and giving us close to three hours of music with as much effort as two-legged guys half his age.
At times it did seem a little more than even he can carry, though. I knew from videos I'd seen that his raspy voice is never really as precise live as it is on the albums, but he had practically lost it completely by about midway through the show at Citi. And after about the 15th song, you could sense a little energy drain, at least until the big finale with Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers. I finally had to sit down myself during "Outside", and I was up and down from then on. But "White Limo", "Arlandria" and "Best of You" are three of my favorite Foo songs, so they ended big.
This was probably my third or fourth outdoor stadium show, and it's no big secret that the only worse way to experience a rock concert is by staying home. The sound at Citi Field was pretty terrible, and at times Dave's voice was barely even audible. Even though we were on the field level, this was the furthest I've been from a band at a show since I saw (coincidentally) Rush in 1986 at Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey, when we were literally in the top row of the furthest possible corner from the stage. (At least for Pink Floyd and Monsters of Rock at Giants Stadium, we were on the floor.) I can't imagine the view, or lack thereof, of those few hardy souls in the upper deck at Citi Field.
But it was fun, I had some great food and a great time with great company (my wife!), and I finally got to see one of my all-time favorite bands on what's no doubt going to go down as a historic tour for them. Nooooooooooooothing to complain about here. Thanks, Dave, for making the effort for your fans.
This is increasingly not a blog about Alphabet City, New York. I used to live in the East Village and work on Avenue B, but I no longer do. Why don't I change the name if I'm writing about Japan and video games and guitars? Because New Yorkers are well-rounded people with varied interests, and mine have gone increasingly off the rails over the years. And I don't feel like changing the name. I do still write about New York City sometimes.
