“I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
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If the death of Gary Speed can be said to have led to anything positive whatsoever, it’s that it has dragged depression back out into the open. Admittedly, early responses from family and friends suggest Speed was not known to be a man troubled by depression, and it may yet come to light that his apparent suicide had nothing to do with the illness at all. However, it would be entirely in keeping with my own experience, as someone who has lived with clinical depression for a decade, for his friends to have been as in the dark as he may have been.
I was inspired to write this blogpost for two reasons. Firstly, James Olley’s piece in yesterday’s Evening Standard, which highlights the problem of depression still going unnoticed in communities where it might be viewed as a weakness, and secondly, an apology I recently received from a GP – an apology made “on behalf of the medical profession” for the six-or-more years I’ve spent taking the notoriously addictive antidepressant, Paroxetine. Having spent a little over 10 years visiting more mental health specialists than I can honestly remember (certainly more than this post will detail), I continue to be amazed by how little people seem to know. Continue reading
I spent this morning reviewing the world’s first pee-powered games machine, a hands-free device launched at The Exhibit bar, Balham, South London. Sent by Time Out to blog the experience, my word count limit meant that I didn’t have the opportunity to report on some of the more geeky aspects of the launch. So, for the really interested urine-driven gamers out there, here’s the full transcript of my interview with developers Gordon MacSween and Mark Melford, dealing with questions like, “Wasn’t the world’s first pee-powered games machine released in Japan in January?” and “What’s in it for the women?” For the complete lowdown, read on. Continue reading
Fake priesting seems to be getting some attention again, thanks largely to On the Virgin Road, or iamafakepriestinjapan, as its URL prefers it. What interests me most about this is that it hasn’t been picked up as a decent blog topic before – I certainly wish I’d thought of it back in my stole-wearing days.
Yes, that’s right. I was a fake priest in Japan. Not that it’s much of a secret; I must’ve told the stories more times than I actually performed weddings – 1,092 weddings all told, between the years of 2003 and 2009. I got pretty good at it, too; so good in fact that there was a point during my peak years (yes, I had peak years) that a “chapel” in Kitakyushu secured my services long-term, as newly-weds-to-be were apparently asking specifically for me. I’d like to humbly admit that I have no idea how they’d even heard of me, but that wouldn’t be true. 2005 was the year, after all, that I began appearing in fake priest commercials. Continue reading
During a brief stopover in Kyushu in the early 1990s, British broadcaster and former Monty Python Michael Palin stopped in at Huis Ten Bosch, a faithful recreation of a Dutch town, replete with gouda, tulips, windmills and a clock tower built out of bricks shipped from Holland. Not sure what to make of it all, he dubbed it ’cultural karaoke’ and quickly moved on. It’s a phrase that I’ve had reason to recall many times, albeit never before when discussing a mountain range.
Protesting is no longer an unusual sight in Tokyo, which might be why the small sit-in outside exit 12 of Kasumigaseki Station attracts scant enquiry. It’s a common enough scene: a small gaggle of local university students, an array of brightly coloured, homemade placards, a guitar and… pouches of salt. It’s the constant dabbing at salt that seems to draw attention, in fact. One protestor is dipping into it so frequently, he looks like a kid on a sherbet trip. What to make of this, I wonder? How to reconcile this image with the fact that what I’m witnessing is a hunger strike?
Everyone knows Booker T. Jones, though not everyone realises it. Despite being one of the most influential musicians of the last half century, he is best known as a session man and songwriter, plying his trade in the background, producing tunes that have been in the foreground more times than you could ever recall.
Booker T. was there when you began raiding your parents’ vinyl collection in your teens, blazing loud behind Wilson Pickett on ‘In the Midnight Hour‘. He was there when you fumbled around on the dance floor, wracking up the emotion as Otis hammered home ‘Try a Little Tenderness‘ (yes, that’s him on keyboards in the video). Heck, he was even there when you learnt what soul music meant, defining a genre on the seminal Sam & Dave track, ‘Soul Man‘ (although not at his usual Hammond B3, as we shall see). As a member of the MG’s, the house band at hit-producing Stax Records, Booker T. pumped out classic upon classic throughout the ’60s and ’70s, and in their downtime the band recorded eternal slices of soulful funk – you probably know and adore ‘Green Onions‘, ‘Hip Hug Her‘ and ‘Soul Limbo’ (the latter better known to Brits as ‘Test Match Special‘).
The man himself is taller than expected (early footage makes him look so boyish, you’d almost think he was five foot nothing), and has the manners of a southern gent well into his sixties. He’s almost apologetic when I wonder aloud how I might go about asking questions that he hasn’t been asked before, and he’s unfailingly polite in discussing the music that made him famous 50 years ago, a subject he must have to deal with on a daily basis. In more recent years, Booker T. Jones has been in the studio with the likes of Drive By Truckers and The Roots, laying down two of the most acclaimed albums of his long career, Potato Hole (2009) and The Road to Memphis(2011), and it’s with these recordings fresh in his mind that we sit down in a quiet room beneath Blue Note Tokyo to discuss a career that has, even in some small way, affected most of us.
It’s a peculiarity of this job that I’ll occasionally interview someone who means zip to me, yet everything to a crowd of other people. In Aamir Khan’s case, we’re talking several hundred million people. He’s the star of Bollywood’s latest blockbuster – heck, he’s the star of the two top-grossing Bollywood films of all time – but the truth is he only popped up on my personal radar a month ago, around the time I dropped into an Indian cinema, handed over my 30 dirhams, and sat down to watch 3 Idiots.
QR codes have been around for yonks. I remember putting them into the artwork for our Cut Flowers posters (a band I played with years back), and thinking they were the very height of modernity. They’ve never had quite the same level of success abroad that they’ve had in Japan; the reason for their appeal here apparently has a lot to do with spelling (the average Japanese net user might be able to remember the phonetics of a URL, but can they still spell it once they get home?), so it’s not much of a surprise to see that QR codes are still around and slowly continuing to evolve.
Late last week, the Japanese government lifted a ban on shipments of beef from Fukushima, Iwate and Tochigi Prefectures, bringing minor relief to farmers whose livelihoods had been threatened by the discovery in late July that over 4,000 kilograms of cesium-contaminated beef had hit the shelves at Aeon, one of Japan’s biggest supermarkets. Not that the pressure has been entirely lifted, of course. Amongst everyday folk as much as the farmers themselves, confusion is rife.
Unsurprisingly, few can tell a becquerel from a sievert, and plenty feel that this lack of knowledge has allowed the government and nuclear industry to patronise and mislead them. Couple that with the perception that the country’s leaders have no real idea themselves (Japan just lost its sixth prime minister in five years in a mess of backstabbing and ineptitude), and the current sense of mistrust is wholly justifiable.