The Long, Bipolar Holiday Weekend
The weekend started off with as rural as you can get with a Saturday morning trip to a 500-year-old harvest festival at a shrine in a town even further up in the mountains and more rural than ours. I don't think I ever heard the name of the village, but I did hear that it's size is currently "40 households." I actually didn't realize this was to be a daytime excursion, so I really had to kick it into gear after a slow rise that morning. The festival was really amazing with kids in tradional garb, including shoe/sandals made from the stalks of the rice plants. They played & danced in the village for about half an hour while one of them - the unhatted, foremost above - "conducted" by chanting & running back and forth and a group of older men sang. It was awesome. When it was all done they marched from the town center up a "hillside" (mountain if you ask me) and repeated it in front of the shrine. If you click on the picture above, you can watch a little 10 second video shot on the camera.
The only way I can think to properly follow such a festival is to hop a train into Osaka & catch some American music, so that's what we did. Blind Beast (a trio of Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, and Yoshimi) and The Evens (Ian Mackaye's new band) were playing at Club Quattro in the Shinaibashi district so we busted out of here Monday morning. It was a holiday - Respect for the Aged Day - so we had the whole day to kill and hit the city early. We lucked into a Mexican Restaurant (YES!!!), stopped by the venue and then spent the afternoon record shopping before catching the show. Both the headlining acts were stellar - Blind Beast actually being much more melodic/hypnotic than I thought they would be - and the opening set by Eye of the Boredoms was also amazing, maybe the best. Even though shows start and get out early to accommodate the train schedule, we still had a long ride & drive back afterwards, finally hitting the sack around 1:30am. Sleep cycle still a little off, but totally worth it. Rad day.
