marxy
beaus in disarray
creation-centre
#ctr-ac

a six-song ep of new music available for free download at web label creation-centre in 192 kbps aac/m4a and 128 kbps mp3 formats

1. intro to

Volume setting enthusiasts: please take into consideration the fact that the initial synthesized bass is the loudest single object on the following audio suite.

Take up arms and walk with pilgrims
To leave evil in our hind
Mauger lack of bold encumbrance
Victory our hearts shall find
- Non-traditional Episcopal hymn

“Cotillion” (coming soon!)

Set your pace today by walking to the other side
And waltzing on the other side, she says to me
You dance like your were born in three-four time
And so I hold her tight (She is probably right)
I was never very good at foxtrotting anyway

2. did you know exactly what i had in mind?

did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?

3. the level one

Hennessy – Tennessee
astounded – confounded
irony – pity

“So don’t belong to what you’re not and roll out all hot on the town with the world in your crown while your beau’s in disarray.”

4. several pieces

a. Gulliver
b. Jennifer
1. soapbox chorus
c. Oliver
2. soapbox chorus

5. we won’t be sold (second verse)

Previously on Marxy:

Looking at the past (1)
but the past (1) we know has all be redacted (A)
They all overreacted (A)
And we’re still paying today (B)
History (C) has taught us that the world is always repeating (D)
The most self-defeating (D)
Trends of an earlier age (E)

Looking up (1) cause (1) is where we’re (A)
The light’s bent and (A)
And the colors are fading (B)
The (C) that brought us here was solved so we’re humbly (D)
Glory is (D)
As we exit the (E)

6. my learned little princess

樺美智子 (1937-1960)
(music David Marx c. 1997, revised lyrics Marxy 2004)

I’m not sure I can give you the remotest idea of what graduate school is like. Nobody ever has. Millions of Americans now go to graduate school, but just say the phrase — “graduate school” — and what picture leaps into the brain? No picture, not even a blur. Half the people I knew in graduate school were going to write a novel about it. I thought about it myself. No one ever wrote such a book, as far as I know. Everyone used to sniff the air. How morbid! How poisonous! Nothing else like it in the world! But the subject always defeated them. It defied literary exploitation. Such a novel would be a study of frustration, but a form of frustration so exquisite, so ineffable, nobody could describe it. Try to imagine the worst part of the worst Antonioni movie you ever saw, or reading Mr. Sammler’s Planet at one sitting, or just reading it, or being locked inside a Seaboard Railroad roomette, sixteen miles from Gainesville, Florida, heading north on the Miami-to-New York run, with no water and the radiator turning red in an amok psychotic overboil, and George McGovern sitting beside you telling you his philosophy of government. That will give you the general atmosphere

— Tom Wolfe, “Introduction” The New Journalism

Originally, graduate school was my excuse to move to Japan. The stipend would pay more than my New York editorial job, and I would have ample free time to work on my music. But once I started studying for my entrance exams (in Japanese, no less), I actually began to enjoy the return to academia. Once in the Master’s program, I only found a minimal amount of stimulation in the classes and required reading — but I abused my new access to vast libraries and indulged my most far-fetched theoretical interests.

But unlike the young Tom Wolfe, stuck in New Haven for a half-decade, I was in Tokyo, where perceptions of cultural decline meshed nicely with my extra-curricular readings. And thanks to the power of the Internet, I was able to dash out my bottled-up ideas to a hundreds then thousands of eager readers and have them repond with long reams of comments calling me dirty names. The daily bashing helped me find the rickety legs of my pet theories and gave me the intellectual stimulus I sorely lacked in a formal business-based program.

Last Wednesday, I graduated with a M.A. and surrendered my student I.D. I no longer have access to my precious hardbound books, nor idle time to dream up Confucian explanations for the poor quality of recent Japanese indie music. Tomorrow, a company starts paying me to apply my knowledge and skills to their concerns, and as a consequence, I will no longer be able to maintain this blog as I have in the past.

To be honest, I have been a bit bored with Neomarxisme as of late. Mostly because a full year of daily writing required every crazy piece of trivia and half-explanation I’ve bottled up over my ten years of Japan study. Between the blog and my thesis, I am now burned out on pseudo-scholary writing. I look forward to finding new media and new contexts for writing, but I don’t know how much I can continue to write a daily blog about Japan. There are many fine “current events” type weblogs about Japanese culture and society, but I have never been interested in providing that type of service. I also find it difficult to find much stimulation from recent Japan. Perhaps, “decline” was a strong word, but I challenge any of my peers to prove that Japan is more interesting in 2006 than it was five to ten years ago.

Originally, I toyed with the idea of totally dismantling this site — leaving only the archives. But instead, I will reset my clock, write at a more sluggish pace, experiment with form and content. I may lose a majority of my readers, but I will hopefully regain my will to write online commentary.

As of next Wednesday, I am officially an ex-student, and the last week has been spent tying up loose ends: listening to teary, drunken speeches at the oidashi konpa, ridding my room of all hardcover books, securing new means of financial support from corporate institutions, maniacally trying to reach level 99 in a stupid portable game I bought for the plane to Portugal. My last government paycheck dropped from heaven into my bank account today, and now I’m going to have to rough up these soft pink hands to keep myself afloat. My visa status will have to be changed, but the transition from Spring Vacation to The Rest of My Life should relatively easy.

Just tonight, I had one of my last “baito” type missions — perhaps the weirdest on record. An acquaintance of an acquaintance has a music project I quite enjoy, and he also does commercial songs for a well known Japanese electronics company. Somehow I got drafted into singing the main vocal of a track related to the firm’s upcoming film festival in Taiwan. I altered some of the English lyrics to better match the company’s original Japanese marketing message — a weird combination of all my sundry half-talents. But, I’m not sure I should ever be singing songs besides my own marginal compositions. Modern technology will probably bail me out and make the track work at the end of the day, but I felt the dull creepiness of being the foreign guy in Japan who gets the job solely because he is the only foreign guy in the room. I will be the first to admit that I am an okay indie musician, but a sham voice-for-hire.

The best part though was doing overlapping harmonies on the final line in the chorus, which happens to be the company’s catch phrase. Imagine actually being the guy in front of the microphone, with the headphones wrapped around your head, singing the 21st century equivalent to a rock version of “Food Folks and Fun.” As a kid, I had dreams of rock stardom, but I’m not sure this kind of scenario ever swam into my mind.

Radio MXUT returns to the Internet with a new frantic mega-mix podcast based on the theme of “electricity.” Over the course of 49 minutes, hosts Marxy and U.T. (Kiiiiiii) bring you twenty-five energetic musical selections: obscure pico pico Japanese electro-pop, digital beats, analog blurts, vintage electro-rock, and a “mashup” of (Lil’) Bow Wow and Architecture in Helsinki — delivering the final nail in the coffin for that particular early Aughts trend. Contractually-obligated pun-laced copy: Radio MXUT deliver another shocking selection of current material! T.G.I.Faraday!

File: mp3
Feed: .rss feed

Credits:
marxy — amperes, volts, mixing
u.t. — ohms, coulombs, narration

Track list after the jump.

Continued »

On October 14, 2004, I posted my first Movable Type entry on www.pliink.com/mt/marxy, thus making my entry into the “blog” universe. After making the effort to write something every single day, my mt.cgi file weighs 4.5 mb! Okay, that does not sound very impressive. Let’s try again: All the essays and comments on neomarxisme add up to 741,437 words. That’s 2,455 pages of text if written in Courier 12. Nice work everyone. Our collective vitriol and bile will be stored on the Internet forever.

This time last year, I was reading a lot and wanted a place to apply that knowledge to my observations of Japanese pop culture. The blog provided a perfect place to throw out those ideas and have them critiqued and reshaped into more appropriate forms. Despite all the bopping and bashing, the debate process has been a pleasant experience overall. On a professional level, however, I’m not sure the effects are so clear. Blogging is supposed to help you develop a “name” for yourself, but all my freelance work comes from personal links to other magazine editors with high social capital. (Traditional networking: 1, Internet: 0) All this intensive writing probably improves my prose to some extent, but the more I write, the more I get disappointed by my repetition of certain sentence structures. And moreover, I’ve always felt the blog to be a horrible detraction from my music: Who would want to listen to a song by a guy who uses the word “aggregate” on a frequent basis?

From the beginning, I’ve said that I have no missionary goal about this blog. Even though I discuss Japan’s problems in great detail, I am not personally fighting for the adoption of my solutions. I like Japan, and I’d like to see Japan work to protect the areas in which it excels. So far, my only goal has been to increase foreign understanding of Japanese culture — warts and all. I’m not sure I’ve succeeded here either, but I do feel that I’ve been able to derail the usual conversation into interesting, foggy areas like organized crime involvement in art, music, and fashion; institutionalized payola; the decline of mass subcultural sophistication; qualms about “Gross National Cool”; and the social meaning of bear posters.

But, my voice was too loud — some of you have confused me with an actual authority — and now I can’t just throw stones from the outside. I don’t like wearing these pessimistic clothes all the time, and I’ve been unsuccessful so far inventing faux optimistic ideas for the sake of balance. Last fall, I was happy to spend time crafting essays, but now I am too busy with the last stages of actual research and album production to really have the time. I have less fun doing the blog, and I’m sure all of you have less fun reading it. I don’t want to pull something as dramatic as a hiatus, but I warn you that the low-quality and muted rhetoric will probably continue until January. Next year, we’ll see if I really have anything left to say.

Thank you to all the readers and all the commenters. I’ve never understood how several thousand people could be interested in the very specific content of this site, but then I realized that they’re all probably just skimming.