circle of jello

back in august while the DNC was convening in denver, it so happened that some dudes i was hanging with were friendly with a certain jello biafra, who spoke at a ralph nader rally and later met us for dinner at a spot that gets a no vote for its food but a yes vote for tango. well, jello got stuck sitting next to me all night, which proved what a fucking square i am, which is okay because i'm also not an insufferable crank. but neither am i a venerable punk icon* channeling his anger about politics in a totally constructive way, hey.

la de da, fast-forward a week when TK came out for a visit and he and monkey and i went camping and hiking at rocky mountain national park for a few days. on our first afternoon we went on a hike to cub lake, and just as we were about to turn around because dusk was falling, we saw a bear! (my first.)

a bit blurry, since i was torn between looking at my camera screen and looking at the bear. we thought it was within a football field away.

then TK went home, i wrote a bunch, squeezed the life out of my last few days in boulder as summer gave way to autumn, and then hurriedly threw stuff in my duffel and spent a week in california before rushing over to tokyo to spend two months. whew.

thursday night, a friend here invited me to a small musical performance by a french singer named camille. they held the performance inside the brasserie at l'institut franco-japonais, where my friend works, and the showcase began with an interview (which i somewhat understood as it was being translated back-and-forth from french to japanese). then camille sang a few songs with two of her backing guys, who voiced some percussion and basslines, and the whole thing was so great that i bought a ticket for the next night's show at a club in shibuya.

so in the bigger venue – though clubs in tokyo are notoriously small – and eight people on stage, the show had a completely different, bigger, freer energy. all the singers and musicians were very much dancers and percussionists, stomping, gesturing, vocalizing, using their bodies as instruments, as well as singing or beatboxing. camille's own songs** are wonderful and funny and sung with a beautiful voice that can go from breathy to soulful to operatic.

and then she did a cover of the dead kennedys' 'too drunk to fuck,' making her cute little translator get up on stage and sing-translate the chorus into japanese. jello might've recoiled at the perversity of this tiny japanese woman repeatedly yelling 'too drunk to fuck!' in japanese, but i think he would've found it as awesome as everyone else did.

full circle! ta da!



*turn down the volume if you click that link at work

**and fast-forward to around 4:30 if you have a short attention span