I will be in Tokyo at the beginning of March and am looking for any information on great clubs and parties. Any board denizen with information or sources to contact please post.

My friend Anthony promotes many of the wild club events in tokyo. You can email him at panacea37@hotmail.com. I'm sure he can tell you something.

[This message was edited by Miss Understood on 02-07-03 at 07:12 AM.]

Thanks! I'll let you know how it compares to NYC.

Thankx for the site referral SpaceBaby. It is loaded. And Miss Understood, Anthony checked in with me via my personal address and gave me loads of advice. I hope to provide you with a report on how utterly whacked a time I have to compensate you for your good turn.

For a first time visitor this city is very glitzy, and the contrast between the sparkling tower developments, the neighborhood alley bars, squatter's camps near the rail stations, all stirred up by an amazing level of incessant street energy really makes for a hyperscene. The best clubs so far are Womb (the currently argued-about number one), CODE (huge), and a new sprawling joint way out on the end of the train line near the waterfront called AGEHA. Entry is on the expensive side everywhere -$20 to $30 but includes one to two drinks. There is no attitude, (now, sometimes I go to clubs in NYC just FOR the attitude) which is kind of like coffee without caffiene, but then you don't have to have your rude-barriers up.

I came here in part to meet with the director of one of the small contemporary art museums about producing a performance. The meeting turned out positive so there may be a bit of Jackie 60/Verbal Abuse gone 21st Century let loose here in the not too distant future.

I promise to get in enough fun trouble for the whole House of Domination while I am here. The only thing missing will be Daddy's digital lens to preserve the evidence.

Domo origato.

[This message was edited by seven on 03-09-03 at 07:59 AM.]

Well, I have to say what is going on here in the clubs I have been to so far makes NYC look flat, at least on the scope and scale of production side. Just the light and smoke productions I took in last night at another party at WOMB were way ahead. From promotions to in-house operation of the event it is highly organized and efficient. To start with, this is a low-crime society so they don't have to deal with having three or four huge doorpeople to do pat-downs. The doorpeople I have encountered here have been singularly impressed by a US passport when asking for ID. Even some of the web sites for the local clubs are amazingly in-depth and full of features like virtual tours, backlists of audio sample programs, etc. Of course this is a kind of corporate mentality but if a large club is to be run these are the points that make it happen well. And just something like a web site that leaves no questions unanswered, from the multiple train routes to the establishment, including prices, to discounts offered on a kind of package deal if one attends four consecutive Friday parties during the month, make it more appealing. Another element is the coat-check. Instead of waiting in line for the attendant at the coat room there are banks of coin operated lockers as in a train station. No wait. No tipping. To put up your coat costs about $1. Even the smaller, more modest clubs just have a vibe about how they are operated that is devoid of the kind of 'you are nominally a suspect until we clear you past the front door' attitude that prevails at every single NYC club. Consider how organized promotions are here just from the 'post party' standpoint. Like London, when you leave the party here you are handed a very glossy cello bag loaded with as many as 20 printed promos for upcomming parties. All the promos are totally high-end design and production, some verging on being literally works of art in their own right. Most of the material turns out to be promos for loads of other clubs. Is there that level of cooperation between promoters in NYC? Most places I have been here have drink prices that are modest by NYC standards. I'm partial to whiskey with a few cubes and it is available for half what is required in NYC.

The hard thing to deal with here at clubs, especially on the weekend nights, is just too many people. Imagine yourself waiting to cross at an intersection at 11:30 at night. The avenue is four lanes wide, the cross walk is, like 50 yards wide. When the light changes for you what is coming your way from the opposite side is a wall of 300 people. I am not exaggerating. In Manhattan you see that like at 5:30 or 6 PM around Penn Station or Grand Central or the South Ferry, and at a few corporate meccas until they empty out. And it happens in a similar tidal way around T-Square B-way during theater hours. But here it is all over the place late in to the evening. So guess what it is like in a club here. That's right. You'd better learn how to dance on about two square feet of space at most. Plenty of spaces in NYC clubs attain a similar density but here it is times two or three. So the party really becomes a kind of churning audience for the DJ and the whole point is how revved up the DJ can send the crowd. Standing in the middle of one of these seas of enthusiasm is an absolutely amazing energy vortex. But no one is really DANCING. And forget about dancing WITH someone else if that is what you prefer. It becomes a kind of audio/visual roller coaster ride in a big way. In recent memory I've only seen this at the Lunatarium in Brooklyn on a few occasions and still on a reduced scale compared to here. The scathing energy is undeniable and of course goes on until like 6 or 8AM. But this is not really dancing - or I guess it is, it is just a different standard for it where you become one drop in the sea that rages to the beat. Maybe this has to do with the cult of the DJ now anyway,-the club scene becomes more like a live music concert where fans worship their celebrities. If that is what the club producers are going for then for me that just makes it another junk-culture spectacle.

With the well-run party, the massive crowd working up to that rocket blast-off peak, there is no question why Tokyo is rife with DJ talent from the US and UK along with the local names. I would say the musical styles available are even a little more diverse with some exceptions and certain genres are somewhat dilluted in 'translation'. There is only one industrial party here and it only happens once every three months at the time of this writing. Mr. P. Orridge's legacy deserves to have more of an audience here. The whole gay scene is very vital here but gay life in general does not seem to be as integrated in to the city society like we are used to in NYC. But I could be wrong about my impression of this. There is a strong roster of monthly or bi-monthly parties produced for those of us with way less-mainstream sexual interests and orientations.

A few other points to partying here. Entry prices to clubs are a bit high at most places, as I mentioned in an earlier post. But plenty of the small clubs are quite reasonable. There does not seem to be a lot of places that one can enter for $5 or $10 though -I'm thinking of what has been going on back on Avenue B and about. Taxis: it is adviseable to have your desired destination written down in Japanese so you can just show the driver where you want to go. The trains here stop at about 1AM or so and a taxi is a costly undertaking. To go just three miles or so can run about $25! -Ouch.- -Forgive the estimated figure here, you know, it was what, 5AM and, well, I was pretty whacked by then so the old neural synapses were not packing much memory capacity then. I got great advice from board denizens on where to source club listings. But once you get here find an HMV store around Shibuya or Shinjuku, they have a magazine section with several excellent local listings publications that have highly accurate information and even locator maps more precise than guides you can find in the US.

It is extremely easy to meet people while partying here, language differences aside.

If you get to Tokyo and stay with friends you don't really need to read any of this since they will connect you to everything and your costs will be kept down. But if you are here alone or with other non-Tokyoite friends the fact is it is difficult to be here in an inexpensive way. I hit a bit of good fortune that enabled me to come to Tokyo when I did some work to help a Japan-based asian artists' organization bring 100 artists to NYC last April to do street performances at the World Trade Center site, (to my surprise, when I turned up on the street there at 6AM for their events they were doing traditional Shinto rites) they paid me back by financing most of my journey here. Miss Understood's advice in her Thialand topic is good, to obtain the Rough Guide, because it is a good source for how to be one of these places inexpensively. Lonely Planet's Tokyo guide is really helpful also. They aren't really tourist guides as much as tools for how to do this well. I like to pick up perfectly good food for breakfast at a convenience store or small supermarket. A lunch can be had for relatively cheap, between $4 to $8 if you step into a small noodle counter. More substantial meals go up in price from there. It is not that easy to find inexpensive accommodations. A low-end tourist class hotel is at least around $80 a night. Traditional Japanese style guest houses are a good bit less but there are not an overabundance of them. The trains are about on a cost par with the NYC subway but it can take about two days of riding to figure out the fare machines and still remains difficult to navigate from station to station, even IN the stations since many are sprawling, at least in my experience. The economy in Japan is quite bad at the time of this writing so prices on most necessities are not exhorbitant but necessities add up. When I go to a place where I don't know the language I always memorize about twenty essential phrases that have to do with obtaining directions, making purchases, and courtesies. I've found that has served me well here. It seems there are a lot of Tokyoites that know a tiny bit of English or at least understand some but I have not encountered many who have English language skills that are what could be termed good. Our mutual ignorance of each others' language doesn't seem to matter too much though because the social culture here is so friendly and incredibly defferential that most people I have to deal with in order to operate on a daily basis here are extremely helpful.

I think I have gotten some clue to the general lean of the culture: shinto/buddhist materialist consumers (like we all have been trained to be-the consumer part that is) - a paradoxicality so existential it actually grants one an automatic soulweightlessness. Workaholism and hedonism vying for the power to introject as though the body itself was just that epitome of technocapitalist availability -the telelectric screen being pasted on its inside surface with the hyperdense articulation of desires and obligations. The outward social codes seem so formal, stilted and rigid because, on the inside, a person is just like an empty horizon, you can throw vision (and anyTHING else) on to it without let-up. Can there be such a thing as aggressive docility? Yet there is an intensely strong sense of ethics and civility to all this that amounts to at times an astounding, even inspiring, level of regard and respectfulness. The World is out of control but the Universe still guides the human capacity to hear, understand, and make space for what grace can be made for each person's presence.

Overall Tokyo is overstimulating in a way only part of NYC is. This hyperdenseness - of material construction, visual blasts, and amazingly dense human agglomeration, is partly due to the city's material newness. We, the US, virtually wiped the city off the map near the end of World War II (one massive firebombing raid by the US airforce in 1945 actually was planned around just the right wind storm conditions). That is not a comfortable fact to think about while you are here. But it is 2003 and we need to keep moving forward with our increasing interconnectedness of the 21st century. You can find old Tokyo, Asakusa, for example, which is still on a human scale and with a slower pace and more traditional feel. But even the oldest parts of the majority of the city's infrastructure are no older than 50 or so years.

I have to say I like Tokyo, because I can not take it all in. In that way it is true to what I like about living experience, -it provides just too much to really fix down. I've always liked being a stranger in a foreign place because it is so like being alone in one's own skin and loose upon the planet. And, similarly as with this planet in general, I have never really wanted to be here forever.

(Thanks to Miss Understood, Anthony, and SpacEbabY for the advice and references.)

[This message was edited by seven on 03-12-03 at 02:38 PM.]