Jr. High Jammy-Jams

Feelin the nostalgia for the 80's 90's. Too bad for me! I wasn't lucky enough to have an older sibling who knew better. I was a bored latch-key kid in suburbia. I used to ice-skate to some synth pop jams a la Depeche Mode every weekend at the mall. The ice-skating rink next to the Ruby's diner with the huge onion rings and crazy cold shakes. Being a girl, you kinda had to have the Immaculate Collection to dance in the mirror to at sleep-overs. In jr. high, our art teacher let us bring in CDs to play in class and every day is was Nirvana. I talked on the phone allll night to the boy I liked about many important topics including who was better: Axl or Snoop.





I want a big crazy dance party!!! MJ, Madonna, Prince, Guns N Roses, Nirvana, TLC, En Vogue, Janet, Salt N Peppa, Jodeci, BBD. Call it pop, call it cheesy, call it bad music! Who wants to dance?

Whatever Works.

Another rad person. Sure enough. Obsessed with Michael Jackson.

It is reassuring to know that in the beginning, noone ever really knows what they're doing.

You Can Pack 10 Bodies In A 7Jo Apt.

That's what I found out this weekend. Maybe a few more peeps if you really don't mind sitting real close and if noone decides to lay down and go to sleep because said person has eaten and drank too much too fast ehem.

Yep I had a good ol potluck. No dance party or twister or cartwheel contests but lots of good home-made food and convo. My lovely guests were responsible for appetizer, a meat dish, rice/bread, and sides. I was in charge of soup & dessert.

Yeah. You wanna bring an easy homemade dessert to your next potluck? You should make some baked apples.
Here is a recipe:

Jona Gold apples
softened unsalted butter
sugar
cinnamon
nutmeg
vanilla extract
chopped pecans or nut of choice

*Pre-heat the oven
1. Core the apples with an apple corer (crucial tool)
2. Cream the butter with sugar and spices & vanilla
3. Mix in the nuts
4. Stuff the core
5. Put it in a casserole with apple juice on the bottom. Cover with foil.
6. Bake at 175 C for 30 minutes . Check & baste with the juices.
7. Bake another 20 minutes or until desired softness.

If you wanna get all fancy, you can take all the juices on the bottom add more sugar and reduce it to make a sauce.

Oh man. Everyone will love you especially if you bring vanilla ice-cream.

Sometimes

We all have these days

Tis The Season To Eat Nabe

Fa la la la la la la la la

What is nabe?
It’s a big giant pot you put broth inside and heat up on a burner on a table. Then you throw your choice of vegetables and meat in it. Then you grab a bunch of friends and sit around the table and poke your chopsticks in there and grab what you want.
It’s healthy, cheap, delicious, and a gateway to merriment. For the grand finale you can put some noodles or some rice in it.

On this goodbye party evening at the KAZE office, we had a vegetarian-freindly soymilk nabe which transformed into a cheesy risotto.
The combinations are endless.

Summer TIdbits

Here are some items to help you get through this summer heat:

1. Sunglass visor. Add extra power and flair to your sunglasses for a mere 100 yen! Stop by Eirin, the wonderful bicycle shop that just opened up at the Martina Hingis on Marutamachi x Kawaramachi.

2. Bubblicious gum. I hear from my Japanese bredren that chewing increases stimulation of the brain. Artificial grape sweetness, bubble blowing fun, and smartness in a compact little cube. The package has a secret flap which reveals bubble tricks you never knew about. Whattaya know- these are also 100 yen.

3. Big Ship. Here's some reggae lovin' to keep you sane in this humidity. This album kills me every time. Freddie Mcgregor's voice is so sweet it makes everything OK.

3 great little tidbits. But the ultimate solution is to get out! Let's hit the beach, drive to the mountains or...get on a plane!

I'm off to San Francisco City! Stay cool y'all!

I Love You, Goodbye

Let's get one thing straight. I love Michael Jackson. My friend said to me, ナナちゃんと言えば、マイケルジャクソン。The day of his unfortunate passing, I was bombarded with tons of texts and emails being like, are you OK? Did you hear? Your hero is DEAD.I have doubles or triples of Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad, and most all his singles on Japanese 7-inch. But the biggest proof of my love of MJ would be the uncontrollable sing-along dancing that overtakes me when a song starts up. My fandom is undeniable.

But I am so glad he is dead. It's about time! Now we can all stop talking about how strange and crazy he is and start remembering him for his amazingness!

Ummm to me, Michael Jackson has been dead A LONG TIME AGO. So his actual bodily death is like, whatevs.

It all went downhill after that album BAD. He wasn't awesome anymore- he was straight becoming weird. Some chose to bash him left and right, some chose continue the adoration, ignoring all the eccentricities. They hailed him as the King of Pop and applauded him again and again onto the stage in all his ghostly, pale, fake, glory. Hello? Are you not seeing what I am seeing?

Michael Jackson- born into a strange and abusive family. Child prodigy and musical genius. Black. Famous at the age of 11. Multi- Billion-dollar recording artist. Possibly the most famous muscian EVER. Can we blame him for being messed up in the head? Poor dude. I don't blame you Michael!

I love you, goodbye.

Miranda July

Miranda July teaches us how buttons are made.

Snake! and Stuff I'm Into Right Now

It’s Golden weeeek! The morning was a bit overcast, but so refreshing. Windows and doors wide open. I was talking yang yang yang on the phone, when, in the reflection in the mirror, I saw something slithering. Slithering! I put my friend on hold to check out the slithering. It was a damn snake, no joke!! It was long! It was chilling on my fence. WTF!!????

Perrier is more than fitting on a warm day, with a nice glass and some mint or lime or a lemon.

What? Have you heard that new DOOM (all big letters but it ain’t no acronym) album? Ooooh!

That movie Burn After Reading is totally excellent, if you are at all into dark comedy and the Cohen Brothers. The acting! The camera angles! The irony!

One more day of vaca. Chillax and enjoy!

What You Say When You Wake Up

10 a.m on this winter day was extrodinarily sunny. The sun daubed the land in broad swathes, but the atmosphere fought to keep noses and fingertips chilly. From the bridge above Kamogawa, it seemed as if the giant ghost of Louis Armstrong descended down and blew a zillion sequins atop the water. I approached the riverbank on bicycle and pedaled south.

I passed maple trees blazing hues somewhere on the color-spectrum where the red meets the orange and brown and mingles with the yellow. I passed clusters of ducks floating nonchalantly, while their long-legged brethren bobbed through the grasses and reeds. I passed homeless men below their hand-made shacks waiting for a tug on their fishing rods. Sometimes the water trickled along, and sometimes it made a perfect mirror of the sky and cityscape.

I read an article today about a Brazilian percussionist, Ivan “Mamao” Conti, who is quoted, “Every day when I wake up, I say, ‘Thank you Lord, for this moment.’” I stopped and thought, do I ever wake up and say that? And frankly, the answer is no. But on this morning, alone and quiet, this is exactly what I said.

Rectifying Your Own Pitiful State

The way to be a cook is to cook. There is completely no secret: just plunging in, allowing time, making space, giving energy, tending each situation with warm-hearted effort.
-Edward Espe Brown, Tassajara Cooking


I felt quite sheepish having to call home to ask if I can come to dinner.

After leaving the house with my stomach satisfied, I rode to the 24-hour supermarket. I wanted to make something to give back and also rectify the pitiful situation my refrigerator was in. The supermarket is a gleaming white halogen wonderland. At any time of day or night, the automatic doors slide open and you can find packages and cartons and boxes stacked high; logos and shapes and colors in neat rows of repetition. I surveyed the aisles. Light bounced off the food into my retinas which sent electrical flashes through my brain. Gyoza! (potstickers), I thought.

When I was a kid, I would help my mom wrap the filling, and I remember her teaching me how to tuck in the folds just so. You learn once, and it stays with you forever. Making food in pockets is like making sculptures, and each one turns out different. Arrange them as you go and they look like an army.

unexpected and good

At times, certain songs suddenly appear that I'm inclined to listen to over and over.

One of these is this.
This Kostars record was tucked away in the myriad of hip-hop LP’s that arrived from my uncle in two large boxes. What's this? The cover looked straight 90’s. Actually, the song sounds straight 90's too. I put it onto the turntable and gave it a whirl as BGM to my Sunday evening dinner-making. Even as background music, I had to go over and repeat repeat repeat.

Forgive me for this sentimental post (and sappy song!) that has nothing to do with Kyoto. But sometimes, it’s not so fun to stick to some kind of rule. Drunk inspiration calls

Curry v. Noodles

It's major Do The Right Thing outside!


According to what the commericals beam into my brain, curry rice is to be eaten all year round, but especially in summer. That's about the last thing I want to eat this time of year, but...
what up with this video? Is it for real? The melody is not much unlike that one Dido song. Remember? The one that Eminem used? Which also happens to have an equally retarded-amazing video!

So what DO i want to eat in this hot hot heat?
Cold slurpy noodles, you feel me?

Stop bySakai for the junk-foody kind of remen (with a sesame-flavored sauce)　North on Omiya from Kitaoji
Toru soba if you're in a more shi-shi buckwheat noodle mood. (East on Nijo from Higashinotoin)

Stay cool y'all!

Go outside

I could feel it heavy the like the condensation in the sky. It was a day full of potential, and there was no way I could stay inside. No idea where. Got on my bike and started pedaling.

This city has so many secret treasures- quaint neighborhood parks and shrines, strange roadside adornments, patches of unknown-to-you green and of course, cafes, shops and shops galore. If you want to discover some of your own, give the guidebooks a rest, and put aside your pre-conceived objectives. Pick a direction and go!

Signs of Summer

These days, the hydrangeas from my grandmother’s garden keep me company in the mornings. And outside, you can see their blue, pink, and purple mini explosions even along the main boulevards zooming with cars. They’re native to Asia, particularly China and Japan, and have the greatest diversity in this region.

“Hurry! Come inside and shut the screen behind you,” my grandmother yells at me after having snipped the big bouquets, “the mosquitos will get in!” Even if one of those hovering pests did manage to slip its way in, we’d just light the katorisenko (mosquito incense coils), I think to myself, not moving as fast as she’d like. Originally made from the crushed and dried heads of Pyrethrum plant, a natural insecticide, the deep green spiral gives off a hearty scent inextricable to summer.

In the kitchen, the eggplants are sizzling in the frying pan. My mother’s sharp knife makes a steady hollow chopping sound on the cutting board, the cucumbers getting ready to top the salad. I have to set the table, and I reach for the small glass dishes instead of the earthen ones. A baseball game blares from the TV. The world is rotating on its axis and summer is approaching.

G-ma's 88th!

Did you know: life expectancy for Japanese women has risen by nearly one year, to 85.52 in 2007? It has remained the world’s longest for the 21st straight year. Woo hoo! But "experts are worried that changing eating patterns ― from the traditional fish and rice-based diet to fast food such as hamburgers and instant noodles ― may soon change this." Boo!

My Grandma turned 88 this year ...and is still going strong.

88 is a special birthday in Japan, called beiju and you have a special lunch or dinner and invite all your relatives.

She is a motor-mouth in an endearing kind of way-her stories never stay on one track. We have to stop her and go, uh... what was the point again?
During the day, she's out in the sun in her garden with a cloth wrapped around her head hunched over picking up leaves. Last week I found her on top of a ladder picking the flowers off the Sansho (Japanese pepper) tree. "I told your mother last year that it would be my last year up on that thing... but I guess not!" Every morning she drinks coffee out of the hugest mug you have ever seen- apparently, her hour-long breakfast is the highlight of her day. Anyway, you get the picture. She is pretty much my hero.

What to get her, what to get an 88-year-old lady...
Heeerrrmm...well, what does she love more than anything? Sake! With dinner served atsukan (hot) every night 365 days without fail. I figured she'd like to change up her drinking cup so here is the final present:



The birds are flying over the waves in a circle around the edge. Go to Japanese antique store Belle on Aneyakoji between Gokomachi and Teramachi. The owner is in it for the love and most pieces are quite affordable.

That Cool Refreshing Drink

My mom took me to the well a on a sweltering summer day full of the ringing of cicadas a few years back. We rode bikes under a lush canopy of trees high above shading us from the sun and arrived at a small covered hut with the usual bamboo scoop to wash your mouth and hands. And next to that, a little tap where a line of people bagan. Plastic 2 liter bottles in bags waiting to tap tap tap it.

I was genuinely astounded. Fresh water coming straight out the ground? You can just go and fill up your recepticle? Filling up my 6 PET bottles each week, it's not so surprising anymore, but every time, it still feels special and somehow sacred.

The wee information on Wikipedia explained, Kyoto sits atop a large natural water table that provides the city with ample freshwater wells.

The most popular well is at Nashinoki Shrine on the east side of the Imperial Palace, but I like to go to a more secret one with less people at Shimogoryo Shrine.

Don't forget to leave a small donation and give thanks.

Burgers and Fries for V-Day

Valentine’s day in Japan is a bummer if you are a girl. The girl buys the chocolate for the guy she has a crush on, and a MONTH later (who knows what could happen in a month- embarrassment, rejection, disease, death!) you might get something back in return. Granted, what you get is supposed to be 3 times better or more expensive or something.

Forget giving away chocolate. I bought some sweet macaron-looking things I would normally never buy. Met up with some friends after work at a bar and we busted them out. They looked like little hamburgers that matched perfectly with our little fries and big beers.

SNOW!

It snowed ALL day today! Big tufts of snow my mom called bontan-yuki (literally peoney snow) Being a California native, I am not used to this! How do you walk outside? It is so slippery! People watch out!

All I can do is stay indoors attached to the heated carpet with my siamese twin carbon heater and blanket smoking on a Spike Lee joint.

Tool TIme

I used to watch this sit-com called Home Improvement when I was a kid. Remembe? Tim “the tool man” Taylor had his own cable TV show but he was oh so bad at home improving. He was always getting hurt and causing some kind of disaster on air because he had the pressing urge to beef things up. More power! rraugh raugh raugh, he would grunt.

This perfectly autumn day I was in high spirits because of the crispy air and the 70’s way the world was being lit. I threw open all the doors and windows for my own home improvement.