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I've been spending some time walking around my new neighborhood and getting to know the joint. Sometimes Tokyo all looks the same...all grays and earth tones and strangly vertical buildings, largely devoid of any redeeming architectural qualities. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of interesting architecture here, but you typically have to look for it. Your average house/apartment building architecture is generally horrible, which is really kind of weird given the amazing beauty of traditional Japanese buildings. Fortunately, there are many temples about in *exactly* that ancient, beautiful style of architecture.

So there are lots of little parks and plants lining the streets here, which is a major shift from Ichikawa. The train station is also surprisingly interesting, architecturally, and I'm kind of dying to photograph it...that desire, however, is strongly dampened by the overall shittiness of my cheap-ass camera. On the other hand, I did manage to shoot an entire music video with the aforementioned crappy camera, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. In any case, the station has lots of interesting curves and angles...I really like it.

This weekend I was pretty naughty. I DJed again on Saturday night in Daikanyama, which is near Shibuya. My last train shoots out of there at 12:40, which is a definite improvement over Ichikawa, although it's still pretty early. Fortunately, it's not hard to find overnight activities in Shibuya if necessary. The main problem is the fact that you will spend insane quantities of money if you aren't careful. For example, last night I was delighted to find myself in a bar that had Red Hook in bottles. You have no idea how very, very happy I was to find decent beer in this god-forsaken city. The Japanese apparently hate good beer, they're apparently about a decade or more behind the States in this regard. Sadly, a single beer will usually run somewhere between 600 and 900 yen, which is the approximate equivalent of 6-9 dollars.

Sadly, my happiness about the beer was tempered by the meat market atmosphere. Also, let me point out that gaijin (foreigners) in Tokyo are often relentlessly fucking stupid. Obviously, I have many wonderful gaijin friends, but, when it comes to meeting new people, I'm quickly approaching the point where I'm more comfortable with Japanese than with foreigners, which is kind of a weird deal.

Let's wrap this up, people. I'm fooling around with some new software that makes remixing incredibly easy, so I spent most of the day working on something new. My compositions from scratch tend to get out of control pretty rapidly, so remixing gives me a definite structure and path to follow. I think it's a good way to develop my skills, and it's a natural extension of DJing so it seems to come more easily.

I have other stuff on my mind, but I can't get it all onto the internet. There just aren't enough hours in the day.