Essays

The news that Steve Ignorant from Crass is to perform for two nights at the Shepherds Bush Empire, rekindling The Feeding Of The 5000 has been greeted with an astonishing amount of debate as to whether or not this is right / wrong / healthy / unhealthy etc. Seldom has the simple act of playing two concerts sparked such a debate about whether fun is more important than the old Situationist concept of recuperation. Frankly, it’s been a wanker magnet.

By George Berger.

The stereotype of Japan’s anime producers as insular, cloistered and sealed off to foreigners was not what Tekkon screenwriter Weintraub encountered when he arrived in 2001. “I found the openness with which people treated me in Japan refreshing,” he tells me from New York, where he runs a film production company with his wife. “Especially within the context of what is supposedly such a closed industry. I felt that everyone I encountered, from Taiyo Matsumoto to the animators to the distributors, treated me the same as they would any writer.”

Roland Kelts on Tekkon and Afro Samurai.

As tour names go, ‘Softcore’ is something of a misnomer. The styling of this twenty-seven date UK jaunt, starring four ‘hardcore singers gone soft’, breaks down under close scrutiny. I can’t comment on Joshua English or Jacob Golden, having never heard their clearly elusive ‘hardcore’ material, but Jonah Matranga was always soft even when he played post-hardcore; and as for Frank Turner, despite parting ways with the brutal British At The Drive-In, Million Dead — Frank is about as far from soft as one man with an acoustic guitar can get.

Richard O’Brien files from the Frank Turner tour.

Seeing Sister live is like going back in time, not a time I was born in, for it’s part Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein, part Siouxsie and the Banshees. The lead singer Gemma dominates the stage with her unforgettable voice – high and low – and haunting presence. The rest of the band dressed in black keep it slick: they are her musical zombies and as the music starts, we are all feeling it feeding through our veins.

Carson Parkin-Fairley reviews Sister‘s recent gig at the Buffalo Bar in London.

We accepted Creationism for an awful long time. Some of the more frightening salvaged souls still believe it in the face of a shocking amount of data to the contrary using the same sorts of logical refutations as holocaust deniers and eight year olds. But Darwin came along with his whacky theory of evolution and put out the kind of visible and verifiable proof that many Christians simply couldn’t argue against. So they did the next best thing. They adapted. They evolved. They said, “Fine, we now accept evolution, but we’ll call it Intelligent Design and say that it was the means by which God created life on earth.”

Jim Martin returns to the fray with his Toxic Thought Syndrome column for 3:AM.

What I have seen, and only very recently, is a blossoming of coverage in Western media of Japan’s cell phone novel phenomenon. Some of them, when published and sold as text-based novels, sell in the hundreds of thousands; one title sold up to half a million books. These are astounding figures for what we still call ‘the novel’, a narrative conveyed in prose, in whatever language, and generally without visual enticements. They are even more dramatic when text-based anythings–novels, newspapers, short stories–are spiraling into irrelevance.

He lives there, so you don’t have to. Roland Kelts‘ latest on Nippon.

Preheat the oven to 375F/190C/Gas Mark 5. In a medium pan, saut é the onion and garlic in the oil until soft. Pour this into a large casserole dish and place the chicken on top. Add the beer, stock, tomato, chillies, allspice, cinnamon and a pinch of salt.
Cover the dish, and place the casserole in the oven and bake for 30 minutes. Add the whole potatoes and back for another 30 minutes, then finally uncover and cook for another 15 minutes, until browned on top. Serve with rice.

A recipe from George Harvey Bone‘s Cooking With Booze.

Watching the two women face off for their summit on the giant screen, both looking intensely focused and thoughtful, I had a sudden brain wave: There they were, Benazir Bhutto and Hillary Clinton, negotiating the fate of global security amid the outbreak of terrorism in some city of the future. Manga publishers, producers and importers such as TokyoPop and Viz Media all reported growth surges in their female consumer base at the start of this century, and the female market continues to expand.

Rolands Kelts‘ latest column for 3:AM.

I ran towards my baby’s cries and I screamed and people stared as if I was mad, and in that moment I was mad, grief-stricken even though the loss was too great to contemplate. I didn’t know what I was doing I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions.

Sophie Parkin on her Moroccan nightmare.

The vibe is different from most other literary events. For a start, there is a lot of jostling for position by the crowd who all seem to be eager to find a spot close to the stage. For another, there is almost as much activity in the bathrooms as there is in the main room. By the time I arrive at 7.30 the place is pretty much full, and a few people have already left in disgust because of the crowd and the fact that the event is running behind schedule. Tao Lin is sat alone, studiously avoiding the glances of Bed and Eeee eee eeeee clutching hipsters. Yoko Ono has also made an appearance, and despite attempts to keep a low profile at the back of the bar, people are whispering and sneaking glances.

Read about Kramer Durette‘s night out with the Offbeat Generation in NYC.

The spread of Japan’s popular culture in the West is predicated upon such misreadings. During my book tour in the United States, I was constantly barraged by young Americans who insisted that they were “otaku,” as if the very term conferred upon them a sense of cool, cutting edge, irrefutable intelligence. Meanwhile, in Japan, I am reminded that no self-respecting citizen of the country self-identifies as an otaku. This dissonance has complicated roots, the beginnings of which I’ll try to trace here.

Roland Kelts probes the underbelly of Japanese society following a trip to London for his latest 3:AM column.