Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

Driving up to Minnesota with my 18-year-old earlier this month provided an unexpected educational opportunity. For a change of pace, I ceded hegemony over the radio to him and as a result, I now can identify many of the songs that have topped the hit charts this summer. I know my Kate Perry and “California Gurls” (and I know that the break is by Snoop Dogg), and I sometimes now even find myself spontaneously singing in my mind that catchy line about melting popsicles. I know my Lady Gaga and “Alejandro,” I know my B.o.B. and “Airplanes.” In fact, we spent a good deal of time turning the knob in search of the latter.

So I encountered a good deal of new music on the road trip. I also met up with some old musical friends I hadn’t heard in decades. Back in 1981 or 82, I had the opportunity to interview Chris Osgood, one of the founding members of the seminal Minnesota punk band the Suicide Commandos. Osgood is creative, smart, funny, and the interview was by far the best I’d ever done–full of hysterical stories, wistful remembrances, pithy one-liners. And then I got home and realized that the tape recorder batteries had died and that only the first couple of minutes of the hour-long session were preserved….

Anyhow, at the time Osgood gave me a cassette tape that included a number of studio recordings he’d done recently with his then-current group, The L7-3 (in addition to Osgood, the band included Commandos’ drummer Dave Ahl and bassist Steve Fjelstad, late of another fine Minneapolis band, Fingerprints). I fell in love with the tunes on the tape and basically wore the thing out, playing it over and over. But The L7-3 broke up shortly thereafter and the recordings were never issued.

Fast forward to my summer 2010 trip to St. Paul: I’m flipping through the CDs in the “Local Music” section at Cheapos Records on Snelling Ave., and come across Men of Distinction, a CD by The L7-3, released late last year on the Garage d’Or label. From the cover photo, I know immediately that it’s them.

Of course I buy the thing and out in the parking lot immediately pop it into the car CD player (temporarily reclaiming hegemony over the roadtrip musical soundtrack). I break into a huge grin with the opening bars of the first song because I recognize it immediately: the CD consists of those same unreleased recordings I fell in love with thirty years ago.

The music sounds just as good now as it did then: punk rock with an M.F.A. and a sense of humor (the music contains allusions to, among others, The Monkees and The Bonzo Doo Dah Dog Band). Take the quirky fragmented sound and intellectual lyrics of the Talking Heads, combine it with the goofy garage-rock spirit of The Replacements, and you start approaching what makes this so appealing. These are two-minute punk rock workouts packed with symphonic intricacies: simple guitar chord progressions that collide with sound effects, complex musical bridges, rhythmical shifts, etc. Highlights include “The History of Philosophy,” “Metaphysics vs. Loud Music,” “Emergency Art Liquidation,” “Snafu,” “What Rock ‘N’ Roll Means to Me.” The song titles provide a hint to the band’s style, I think. Anyhow, I can’t tell you how happy I am to welcome these amazing songs back into my life.

In trying to figure out how this miracle happened, I poked around the Internet and learned that other previously lost material from late ’70s Minnesota punk was also now available. The remarkable 1978 debut EP by Fingerprints (think Iggy and the Stooges meet Television) is available at I-Tunes, as is the long out-of-print debut EP by The Suburbs.

By coincidence, The Flamin’ Oh’s, another terrific Minneapolis band from that era, has recently created a new Facebook page with lots of good stuff on it. They’ll be playing a live gig July 31 in Minneapolis in honor of their recently deceased drummer, Bob Meide. If I weren’t scheduled to be giving a talk in Tokyo that afternoon, you can bet I’d be there…. In the meanwhile, here’s a clip from a typical Oh’s gig from back in 1981 at Duffy’s (man, how much of my youth did I waste at that bar?). If you’re pressed for time, advance the clip to 2:59 for the second song in this sequence: “We Do What We Like,” a great rock anthem that should have conquered the world.

I’m now reading a book I’ve been curious about for more than a decade, Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. I’m up to the chapter on John Dewey now and was interested to learn the history of the University of Chicago Lab School, where my son graduated from high school last year and where my daughter still goes today. We’re justly proud of the school, and we love to point out that it was founded by the great educational philosopher Dewey as part of his mission to transform philosophy into a form of radical democratic practice.

From West’s fine book, I also learned the part of the story that usually gets left out when it gets related here in Hyde Park:

Unfortunately, Dewey himself failed to articulate a plan for social reform to which his progressive schools could specifically contribute. He was aware that schools by themselves could not bear the weight of a full-fledged reform of society; yet he also knew that the schools themselves were ideologically contested terrain, always worth fighting for and over. And in 1904 Dewey’s school came to an end after a series of mergers and the subtle dismissal of Dewey’s wife from its principalship by University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper. Dewey immediately resigned from the university. Luckily, Columbia University moved quickly and financed a new chair in philosophy for him. And the luck was American pragmatism’s too, for it was in New York City, and maybe it had to be there, that Dewey emerged as a world-historical figure. (p. 85)

It started raining last night just as we headed out to the car. The weather forecasters had been falsely promising thunderstorms for several days until I stopped believing them, but for once they were right. By the time we reached the parking lot at New Comiskey Park (I continue my personal boycott of the corporate name for the ballpark here on the South Side), it had mutated into a full-blown cloudburst. We tried waiting it out in the car, hoping it would blow over. After twenty minutes it did, allowing us to we make our way to the stadium and our unexpectedly fine seats–36th row behind home plate. We were even tucked safely under the second-deck overhang, an architectural umbrella against any additional precipitation. Not bad for an impulse purchase made on the Sox’ webpage the night before….

The rains came back, delaying the start by nearly two hours. First pitch, scheduled for 7:10, wouldn’t take place until 8:51. But I didn’t mind much: I love just sitting in a ballpark, and the crowd was mostly in a jovial mood. It was Polish-American Culture Night on the South Side, and a local folk dance company entertained us on the big screen as rain continued to fall. Through the marvels of cell phone technology, our 14-year-old located a classmate sitting two sections over. It continued to be hot and steamy: the rains didn’t pack enough fury to knock the humidity out of the air, but rather added to it. As you’ve probably heard, it’s been a little hot in the northern U.S. the last few days….

As usual with baseball, the little quirks are what stand out in memory: watching the grounds crew before the game deal with the infield tarp, which had ponded over with several inches of water in places, for example. Or seeing Polish-American former Yankee star Bill “Moose” Scowron (and his tiny tow-headed granddaughter) throw out the ceremonial first pitch. They showed the Twins-Blue Jays game on the big screen through the rain delay, and I had to check my natural instinct to cheer when Minnesota scored (everyone around me booed, of course).

When the baseball finally got underway, Jake Peavy pitched for the Sox against Jered Weaver for the LA Angels. Our youngest is an Angels fan, so to bug her I started cheering for the White Sox (as a born Minnesota Twins fan, this took some effort). The Sox started the scoring early: Juan Pierre led off the bottom of the first with a double, stole third, and then trotted home on an Alex Rios sacrifice fly.

In the top of the 2nd, in the middle of Mike Napoli’s at-bat, Peavy started walking toward the White Sox dugout immediately after releasing a pitch. He stopped at the foul line, turned back toward the pitchers mound, but then halted again. Something was wrong. Manager Ozzie Guillen came out to check on him, and quickly Peavy resumed walking toward the dugout. They announced several innings later that he had strained a muscle in his back.

Tony Pena took over pitching duties for the home team. We enjoyed seeing Torii Hunter, one of our favorites since his Minnesota Twins days, hit three singles, the first two barely leaving the infield. It felt odd to watch Matsui Hideki wear a Los Angeles uniform: in my mental geography, he will always belong to the Yankees.

We stayed long enough to see Rios blast a home run to left field in the bottom of the sixth, giving Chicago a 2-1 lead. As always, they lit off fireworks behind the scoreboard in center to celebrate the homer. By then it was after 10:30 p.m. and our youngest had summer school in the morning, so we headed for the parking lot. We listened on the radio as Andruw Jones hit his 399th career home run in the seventh, giving the Sox a 4-1 lead. The drive back to Hyde Park took exactly one inning, and I watched the eight and ninth on television in the comfort of our air-conditioned family room. Chicago won, 4-1.

I have tickets to see the Phillys and Cubs at Wrigley a week from Friday. No more rain, please. And, as long as I’m putting in my weather requests, is a nice Canadian cold front too much to ask for?

Those of us who study Japanese culture and literature at the University of Chicago had an exciting year in 2009-2010. We’ve now posted video of some of the major events. Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo delivered this year’s Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture in March. Video of his speech, “A Novelist Re-Reads ‘Kaitokudo,'” in the original Japanese is available here, and the lecture with an English-language voiceover (done by yours truly at the event) is available here.

Our Japan@Chicago conference this year was held in late May and devoted to the topic of “Engaging Commodities: Crossing Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde in 1960s Japanese Film, Music, and Art.” The event included several specials guests, musicians who were active in the 1960s rock scene in Japan. They spoke about their experiences then, and they also brought along their guitars and played a few songs for us. These included Alan Merrill, who was active in Japan in the 1960s Group Sounds band The Lead, then as a solo artist signed to Watanabe Productions, and later in the early 1970s pioneering glam rock band Vodka Collins. Here is video of Alan performed his 1973 Vodka Collins hit, “Automatic Pilot.” Alan closed his impromptu set at the conference with a rendition of a song he wrote and first recorded in 1975 with his UK band The Arrows after leaving Japan: “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” (video here).

We also were lucky enough to have three original members of the legendary Yokohama band The Golden Cups join us for a question-and-answer session: Eddie Ban (lead guitar), Louise Louis Kabe (bass), and Mamoru Manu (drums and vocals). At the end of the evening we had a jam session with Eddie Ban and Alan Merrill. They played three numbers together, including a sly Japanese-language version of “Sweet Home Chicago” (video here).

It was a terrific year, and we’re already planning some very interesting events for next year….

We spent yesterday afternoon at the Field Museum of Natural History, taking in the “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit. The centerpiece artifact is Lyuba, the one-month-old mammoth discovered frozen below the permafrost in northern Russia in 2007. She is remarkably well preserved for a creature some 40,000 years old: she is even cute in a baby animal sort of way. But as I gawked I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what separated this scientific exhibit from, say, the curios that drew crowds in 1840s and 50s New York to P.T. Barnum’s Museum. Well, it’s something to do with the kids on a summer afternoon, and it’s air conditioned.

(Image source)

If I were in England this weekend, I’d be trying to worm my way into the Glastonbury Festival. Among many others, one Raymond Douglas Davies will be taking the stage for a set on Sunday. A preview article notes the role the Kinks had in establishing this annual music festival back in 1970:

In 1970, founder and dairy farmer Michael Eavis decided to hold a music event and booked the Kinks for 500 pounds but, when they failed to show, got Marc Bolan instead.

Typical. Ray is a little better about these things nowadays, so presumably he will actually play his scheduled set.

Tonight, the plan is to catch the fabulous jazz chanteuse Dee Alexander in a free concert out on the Midway Plaisance. Summertime, and the living’s easy….

Watching the World Cup matches from South Africa–including this morning’s anxiety-provoking U.S. 1-0 victory over Algeria to advance us into the second round–and reading Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, I’ve frequently been reminded of my teen-age years, spent as a fervent follower of the North American Soccer League’s Minnesota Kicks. Several of the Arsenal players that show up in Hornby’s memoir–Geoff Barnett and Charley George, for starters–played for the beloved Kicks. Certainly the greatest sports moment of my youth was the evening I watched the Kicks demolish the dreaded New York Cosmos 9-2 in a playoff game, with Alan Willey alone scoring five goals for us.

Watching the games from South Africa, I’ve been in particular fondly recalling #11, midfielder Patrick “Ace” Ntsoelengoe, probably the finest South African footballer of all time. The BBC recently named him “The Greatest Player You Never Saw,” but if you were a Minnesota soccer fan in the late 1970s, you were lucky enough to witness his remarkable dribbling and passing skills. I remember in particular a spectacular scissors kick shot on goal from 1977: it didn’t go in, unfortunately, but it was one of the flashiest moves I’ve ever seen. Ace was the heart of the Kicks from 1976-1981–and he returned home to South Africa in the off-season to play for the Kaiser Chiefs there (or was it the other way around? Were we the off-season team?). He scored more than fifty goals in his Minnesota years, and for budding soccer players and fans in the Upper Midwest, he was our primary model for what made the beautiful game so pretty.

Ntsoelengoe sadly passed away from a heart attack in 2006. How much he would have enjoyed watching his own national team knocking off the French yesterday! Sigh.

Forgive my bout of wistful nostalgia, please, and return with me now to 1978 and Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, for a fine late summer’s night dream.

The Chicago Shimpo, a local bilingual weekly aimed at the Japanese-American community, has given nice front-page coverage to our recent conference, “Engaging Commodities: Crossing Mass Culture and the Avant Garde in 1960s Japanese Film, Music and Art.” The newspaper focuses on the guest musicians who participated, The Golden Cups and Alan Merrill, including interviews with the Cups, their manager, and with three long-time fans who traveled from Japan to attend the event. The article includes many photographs, as well.

A .pdf file of the English language version of the article is here, and the Japanese language version is here.

For the most part, I accept the thesis — argued, for example, by Nicholas Carr (thanks for the link, Linda) — that the Internet is making us all stupid and asocial. On my visit to Japan a couple of months ago, a friend put her finger precisely on why reading text on a computer screen is less satisfying than reading a book: when we pursue virtual reading, we enter into the same mental frame as when we watch television.

And yet, and yet…. This afternoon in my office on campus, I took a break from stultifying end-of-the-year administrative work to watch the second half of the Uruguay-France World Cup match being streamed live by ESPN. A so-so game (Uruguay’s defense was the highlight, and you know how exciting defensive soccer can be), I was still thrilled to be watching it in my office, thanks to the Internet.

The first World Cup I followed was in 1978, well before the rise of the Internet or even cable television. As I recall, that year only the final championship game was shown on American television–and at a taped delay, at that. During the 1982 tournament, I was luckier: I was doing the backpack-through-Europe thing and watched games at pubs, youth hostels and train stations across the continent. I was in Frankfort staying with cousins for the final match between Italy and West Germany, and I remember all the Gastarbeiter waiters and janitors from Italy exploding onto the streets of Frankfort to celebrate their team’s win–and to rub it in the faces of their employers.

In subsequent tournaments, cable television kicked in, giving us futbol-ignorant Americans better and better access each time around. Now we get it streamed live over the Internet so that we can watch it in the office, on trains, in coffee shops.

Perhaps not all change is completely bad. Maybe stupidity and alienation are a small price to pay. I’ll have to mull on those thoughts a while longer, if my Internet-addled brain can hold the problem in focus long enough. In the meanwhile, I’ll be setting my alarm clock to get up early tomorrow morning to watch South Korea play Greece, followed by the U.S. taking on England for the first time since the great 1950 upset match, still the greatest moment in American soccer history.

Yesterday, I ordered Stew’s new CD, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, from the good folks at CD Baby, a terrific clearinghouse for independent music. Below is the shipping confirmation e-mail I received from them this morning, a brilliant parody of customer service that in fact performs brilliantly as customer service. Bravo!

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, May 13, 2010. We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Sigh…
We miss you already. We’ll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.
—
CD Baby

I have a powerful sense today that I am returning now to my own life after a considerable absence. For at least the past week, I have seemingly been living the life of someone else — someone with similar tastes and close connections to me, but someone operating on a different calendar, ruled by different forces. And, obviously, someone who doesn’t update their blog very much. On the whole, it wasn’t a bad week, though a bit on the hectic side. I’m glad to find myself back in my own shoes again today.

Let me trace it back to a week ago tonight. I (or whomever it was) caught the Ike Reilly Assassination in concert at Lincoln Hall. Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s boy) opened with a surprising paranoid set of Southern-fried prog-rock-country, and then Ike and his band took the stage. His parents were in the house, he announced, and it was all in all a fine show. Shooter came on stage to perform the wonderful duet, “The War on the Terror and the Drugs,” included on Ike’s most recent album. If you haven’t heard it yet, stop whatever it is you are doing immediately and click on the following video:

The next day was my anniversary, and we celebrated by watching our daughter play Lucy in a middle-school production of “Snoopy! The Musical.” Our offspring performed wonderfully well, and the show itself is great fun, including complex ensemble songs like “Edgar Allan Poe” (see video from another production below) and “Clouds.”

On Saturday afternoon, I was at the Joffrey Ballet, taking in “Eclectica,” their spring program: Gerald Arpino’s 1971 piece, Reflections, plus two world premieres: Jessica Lang’s pretty awesome Crossed , a meditation on religion and spirituality in which the dancers duck around large moving stage sets, and James Kudelka’s Pretty BALLET, also quite striking. One reviewer calls it “the most intellectually engaging Joffrey program in recent memory.” Call me engaged.

I then jumped into the car and drove to Sparta, Wisconsin, where I spent the night in a dive motel that shall remain nameless. Only the sheets have been changed to protect the innocent. The next morning, I drove up the Mississippi River to Stockholm, Wisconsin, to pick up some of my mother’s paintings for a new retrospective exhibition. I’d forgotten how pretty that part of the country is. I spent the rest of the day tracking down more paintings for the show across central Minnesota — Edina, St. Paul, North Branch.

Monday morning I helped set up the exhibit in the Art Gallery at Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater, Minnesota–where my mother, my sister, and I were all born. It’s a wonderful collection of 14 of my mother’s best works, many of which haven’t been shown publicly for years. It will be open through June 29, and there are new prints and cards of my mother’s paintings for sale in the hospital gift shop. Details on hours and how to get there can be found here.

Monday evening found me at Target Field, the new home of the Minnesota Twins. While ingesting far too much animal protein, I watched my favorite baseball team clobber the Detroit Tigers. Wilson Ramos, the Twins’ fine young catching prospect, got three hits in his second Major League game, this after he collected four the night before in his debut, thereby setting a new rookie record and sending Twins’ fans into a mild frenzy. It’s a fine new ballpark, too, with many thoughtful details, inside and out. I didn’t mind the raindrops that fell intermittently through the evening, not one bit.

Tuesday, I drove back to Chicago, picking up along the way our oldest from his dorm to haul him home for summer vacation after his freshman year at college. Then yesterday I helped host the great historian Harry Harootunian for a couple of very stimulating talks here at the University of Chicago. The day ended at a restaurant in Chinatown, with good food and lively talk with our visitor and several colleagues.

After all that, I woke up this morning and looked in the mirror, and it was me again. Welcome back, and don’t forget to turn off the lights when you leave again.