After nearly 20 years in the business, Shonen Knife are still neither bored nor boring.
The punk/pop band from Osaka has always been a trio, but there have been quite a few lineup changes over the years. Guitarist/singer Naoko Yamano is now the only remaining original member.
It’s still the same old Shonen Knife, though. As soon as they hit the stage you could see why Kurt Cobain once said that the first time he saw them he turned into a 12 year old at a Beatles concert. Continue reading
After 10 years in the business, Japan’s Red Bacteria Vacuum is a perfect example of how to do women in punk the right way. Powerful without being over the top about it, by turns aggressive and fun, their reputation as a killer live band has earned them slots at SXSW and as part of the Japan Nite tour 2 years in a row.
We caught up with bassist Kassan at home in Tokyo shortly before the band set out on their American tour. Continue reading
Polysics are Japan’s answer to Devo. Weird, experimental, blending elements of pop, punk, rock, and New Wave into a stew that’s definitively Polysics, they’re fun and totally unique.
With keyboard player Kayo about to graduate*, Kirsty Evans caught up with the band a few days into the American tour to chat about how things are going and their plans for the future.
(In Japan the term graduate is used to indicate that someone is leaving a band, or that a band are leaving a record label. The implications are positive, not negative. Also, please note that unless otherwise noted, the singer, Hiro, is doing the talking.) Continue reading
Toshiya, bassist for Japanese alt rock phenomenon Dir en grey, isn’t interviewed very often, but we got a chance to catch up with him during their recent American tour and found him smart, thoughtful and refreshingly direct. Dark, weird, and frequently rather disturbing, Dir en grey’s unique amalgam of styles has earned them a rabid underground following all over the world. This is what Toshiya had to say about the band, how they function as a unit, and what his own contribution to the process is.
Kirsty: Recently it seems like you’ve been experimenting with slap bass. What brought on your interest in experimenting with other techniques? Are there any other styles you’d like to try?
Toshiya: Hmm, I’ve always had an interest in slap bass. But I never really planned on doing it. Lately… I felt like it was one way to play and started try to play that way. As for new techniques, right now, I’m not really thinking of any. But I would like to gather new techniques.
Kirsty: It seems that you only wrote maybe one song on the last album. Will you be writing more for the next album?
Toshiya: Though I am thinking of writing a couple songs, we all bring material and all five of us do it– it’s not like only one person contributes; everyone works together. It’s like that.
Kirsty: In the promotional picture that your management sent us, I noticed that you’re wearing a skirt. Why did you start doing that again? Continue reading
The current media blow-up over the Roman Polanski case has exposed our culture’s disturbing whitewashing of the personal characters of creative people, as well as served up an entirely bizarre idea that Polanski is somehow being persecuted “for his art.”
In 1977, the director was arrested for drugging and raping a minor. Yes, he plea-bargained down to a lesser charge before fleeing the country upon realizing that his plea bargain might not actually get him off the hook for the more serious charges, and that he might actually get some real jail time, but the fact remains – what he was initially charged with was rape, forcible sodomy, and giving drugs to a little girl. This happens to perfectly match the testimony of the victim, which anyone feeling the need to defend Polanski should really read before making any further comment, because it is horrifying.
Let’s face it, everyone pretty much knows what happened here. A rich, famous, powerful man used his position and the lure of a potential career in Hollywood to entrap a 13 year old girl into a situation where she was alone with him, drugged her with booze and Quaaludes, and then raped and sodomised her. While he was doing this, she was saying no and pleading to be allowed to go home. Anyone who wants to argue this – again, read the victim’s testimony.
This should be just about as watertight a rape case as has ever existed. The victim was drugged, and still, even when drugged, clearly non-consenting. She was underage and frankly, looking at photographs from the era, barely pubescent. And the man who raped her was old enough to be her father.
Pretty straightforward, right? Who could possibly blame a vulnerable child for what happened that night, or try to excuse the behavior of the man who attacked her?
Igigi designer and founder Yuliya Raquel has always been obsessed with fashion, but it was fate that she found her very specific passion, designing clothes for the plus size market. Outspoken and articulate, Yuliya has a vision of a world in which everyone is allowed to feel beautiful. Kirsty Evans sat down with her in her office/workshop/warehouse, surrounded by gorgeously colorful dresses, to find out what drives her and her hopes for a future in which fashion is for everyone.
Kirsty Evans: When did you first become interested in fashion?
Yuliya Raquel: I was five years old, and my grandma had a really cool sewing machine.
Kirsty: Do you have any formal training as a designer or a dressmaker?
Yuliya: Not formal. I did take classes in high school in Russia; it was part of the standard program. And then, because I was so fascinated by it, I took additional classes when I was still in Russia. When I got here, I took a few classes too. It was just something that was very natural to me.
Kirsty: How did you first become interested in plus size fashion in particular?
Yuliya: When we first came to the United States, my mom gained a lot of weight. It was a medical thing, actually, and she went from a size 12 to a size 24. Her confidence plummeted.
Kirsty: And, of course, none of her clothes would fit.
After 17 years together, Tokyo-based alterna rock band Noodles are still going strong. Kirsty Evans sat down with them during their latest trip to the USA as part of the Japan Nite tour to talk about how they got started, what inspires them and their plans for the future.
Kirsty Evans: Hi, welcome to San Francisco. You’ve been here before, correct?
Yoko: Yes, for the past six years we’ve been here once every year.
KE: I read in an interview that a previous trip here made quite an impression on you – wasn’t that part of the inspiration behind your album “Metropolis,” our skyline at night?
Yoko: When we came to San Francisco three years ago we arrived by car across the bridge, so we could really see the scenery, and we took that image for our album because we thought it was very beautiful.
KE: So are you glad to be back? Have you done anything fun here so far?
Hayao Miyazaki’s “Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea” is another perfect illustration of why he may well be the most quietly influential feminist filmmaker out there right now.
Unlike previous works such as “Princess Mononoke” or “Spirited Away,” “Ponyo” is aimed squarely at very young children. Think of it as more in the realm of “My Neighbor Totoro.” For that reason the plotline has been simplified, and a lot of the background explanations that you’d usually find in Miyazaki movies eliminated, but the core characteristics that the man has built his career around remain.
“Ponyo” is a gorgeous movie. Though the plot is very similar to Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” the visual style is different. While the Disney version features a rather glamorous adolescent princess Ariel, Ponyo starts out as a goldfish with a face, one of many identical but smaller sisters (let’s all pause to give thanks for a filmmaker who actually understands where little fish come from). If you’re a parent looking for movies for your little girl that won’t warp her body image, Miyazaki is always a good bet, and “Ponyo” is no exception. It’s incredibly refreshing to see children in animation who actually look like children, with soft round faces and little round bellies.
It’s time for an updated edition of Susan Faludi’s Backlash
Witness the recent mass murder of women at a gym in Pennsylvania by a man obsessed with his inability to get women to sleep with him. Also witness the media response, most of which has focused on how unhappy the poor man was (you know, when I’m unhappy I cry on a friend’s shoulder, or mope, or have a drink – I have yet to decide that murdering strangers would be an appropriate response to unhappiness). Witness the killer’s blog, which was full of misogynistic ranting about how evil women were for rejecting him, and fantasies about hurting them. Witness in particular the response from some men who seem to consider this guy some sort of hero.
And then let’s remember the young man who drove his car into a crowd of pedestrians in Akihabara in Tokyo and then stabbed a bunch of people. Half a world away, a 23 year difference in age, and yet an oddly similar fixation on the idea of rejection by women as somehow tied in with generally low social status.
There was also the Virginia Tech killer, whose manifesto contained strikingly similar ideas about how he felt mistreated by women.
What do these three men have in common? A deep and disturbing anger against women and a strange fixation of the idea of women’s not wanting to sleep with them as the source of all their personal problems (compounded in the Akihabara case by the fact that the killer was about to lose his job, another classic spur to male status anxiety).
Why must every single possible female demographic have its own clever little acronym? (I use the word “clever” here ironically.) The latest manifestation of this loathsome trend is the term TWIT. Brits will at this point already be poised to belt anyone referring to an entire group of women as twits, but wait! It means something! “Teenage Women in their Thirties”, apparently.
Where to begin? Well, how about with the fact that, other than for perhaps the last two years, teenagers are not women. This is why we have the word “girl”, so that we can distinguish between the two. Then we have the supposed definition of TWITs as described by Eleni Hale – “Just like men with Peter Pan-syndrome who are not ready to grow up, TWITs are putting serious relationships and parenthood on hold, instead choosing to continue partying and enjoying the freedoms they discovered in their teens.” So, um, basically you mean female adults who don’t have children and who have active social lives. And the existence of such people is a surprise because…?
What seems to be going on here is the old phenomenon where it’s OK for men to do whatever they feel like as long as it’s not illegal, but when women step even an inch outside the mommy and housewife box this clearly spells disaster and the impending breakdown of society. Also it’s terribly salacious because – women going out drinking? In clubs? There may be the pursuit of sex afoot! We can’t have that.
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