Continuing...

Back to Tsukiji, the Tokyo fish market and what would a fish market be without ice? Most likely stinky and empty so they have this big old conveyer belt machine where giant ice blocks are sent up to drop down and be pulverized. Bring your own bucket.

Though sparse, other necessities were evident and I am not sure what all that stuff is but I do know an edamame when I see one

What I did not know is what they make those little green guacamole balls out of that are sitting on sushi plates. Shhhh, for those who don't know Sushi that well, here is some advice: You will find a small green guacamole ball on your sushi plate. The really cool thing to do is just pop that whole delicious morsel right in your mouth really fast, first thing, mmmm, yummy! But hurry because that stuff is in high demand and someone else may get yours if you aren't quick.

So turns out that even though that green stuff looks like guacamole, and tastes of so yummy by the spoonful, it is actually called wasabi and looks like this

before being turned to paste. The old school way is to rub it on shark's skin but now a days they have metal grinders. What I also did not know is that nearly all the wasabi outside of Japan is fake because the real deal is too expensive.

Though the market does not smell, it is a bit messy and at the end of the day when it's time to run the numbers and do some calculations, I can see where the abacus would hold up a bit better in this environment that battery powered calculator.

Off to lunch and 9 am as all this fish walking made us hungry. Roadie James, Chef Assist Julius and Raymond our friend and tour guide of the market you can see and Scott, and Wayno you cant. Raymond is the one who hooked us up and has friends and relatives at a few shops in the market which is why the next round of sushi was some of the best Toro tuna I have ever had, so good I forgot take a picture.

And a short Youtube version for those that like visual motion.

**** End Fish Market Adventure ****

OK, now back to being jet lagged.

Dave Rat

First order of business today is a bit of back repair and the promoter has arranged so graciously an acupuncture/acupressure specialist to swing by my room and fix me up. While I am waiting, I head over to the mini bar drawer and find a coffee which both impresses and depresses me. Japan's creativity and creations are amazing and some of the things they come up with boggle the mind. So there is a coffee cup and a mini filter and little filter holder and cream and sugar and a stir stick and a top all in a neat little package.

Dump in hot water and poof, a perfect cup of drip coffee. While this is interesting and somewhat useful, it also highlights the reality that a many Japanese products are beyond belief wasteful in their packaging to the point where the amount of trash created often outweighs the consumable product itself, do you remember the plastic bottles full of ice when I was here before? Which in my opinion cancels out the cool factor. True beauty in design occurs when a harmonious balance between function, aesthetics and efficiency is reached while minimizing any negative impact that resides in the surrounding world from both manufacture and post consumption.

The massage /acupressure does a great job of lining me back up and reducing the ouch factor and it is time to head to the gig and a good sized gig it is. The moment I walk in through the revolving doors the instant air pressure surge hits me. "Ah, an air filled dome." It is one of those venues where they have a soft flexible roof and giant blower fans some where that pumps in enough air to keep the roof up, sort of like a giant version of those air filled things kids jump around in at the fair. All doors the are revolving and the trucks enter through multi-stage air locks to unload and it gives me a headache if I go in and out of the pressurized room too many times.

The air supported ceilings are surprisingly strong and as you can see in the picture below, you can hang lights and stuff from the flexible roof. Our touring production is too heavy for it though so we have everything supported by the stage we had brought in for us. Occasionally while touring I have come across and air filled arena where we have hung the sound system from the floating roof and it is really strange to see the chain motors running and the gear not lifting till the roof sufficiently sags to to hold the load. And then when audience leaves at the end of the show, the PA drops down a bit due to the air pressure dropping/escaping.

The double hung mains and 15 deep side hangs with 3dV-Dosc under all clusters plus 6 dV-Dosc in top of the side hangs and for center cluster totaling a whopping 90 V-dosc and 36 dV-Dosc not including delay clusters and that is one bad ass PA!

Down below is a modified sub cannon setup with 4 side stacks using a 2 foot spacing and an 8 sub center cluster.

Here is a graphic of the sub layout that roadie Lee put together, Lee rocks!!

Having this much clean sound power is really fun. Hello Homare, Tukiji and Raymond and thank you for the awesome fish market adventure and coming over to my office for a rock show adventure! Sashimi and Soju for all!

Speaking of rock show, hey look, there it is!

Now that was fun!

Dave Rat

Forth time to Japan in less than a year. Jet lag hits me hard this time. Usually I deny it's incapacitating grip but instead I just give in and rest my back and indulge in being horizontal. I could care less what the time is when I sleep or rise. Exhaustion from my marathon run at home during the tour break sets in. Nap after nap, computing at all hours and the 24 hour local quick market has fishy rice balls and water that sustain my hunger. A full night and day and night and day before a midnight load-in forces some reality into my mix. At some point while living this bleary timeless state the phone rings and it could be 6am or pm and it makes no difference.

"Lobby call in 3 minutes, the van is already here, we are headed to the fish market, hurry up" Lampi Scott's voice, I am pretty sure, is coming from the phone. Well, it's all news to me and I was out the door before I even bothered to ponder where or why I was going. The fish market we did, shopping with Wayno the Chef, in the seafood equivalent of New York's Wall Street. Passing through the gates, we are informed that we have entered a no-man's land where city laws no longer apply. The police don't enter except to haul out the occasional body from a miss step off off a high place or other questionable demise. The fish mongers rule this land and whatever you do, don't get run over by a cart.

Turns out there are two types of carts, old and new and one type gives you a bigger owie than the other when failing to move from it's path, though it is tough to figure out which is which. The old one was born in centuries past while the new one is nothing like anything I have ever seen. A rotating turret with a motor inside and a steering wheel and thinner round wheel brake on top. The powered front wheel can turn so sharp that it can nearly go backwards and turns inside less than its own length.

Isle after isle of any and every species of ocean life, now food, endlessly fills this massive warehouse and most surprising is what is not seen, the smell of fish and that fact that it is practically non existent. Amazingly, barely hint of scent of the fish as far as the eye can see, all perfectly iced or dry iced

and messes scrubbed clean into the constant flow of fresh water steams disappearing into rough gutters and away.

The king of fish here is the tuna. Massive multi hundred pound swimmers flash frozen on the boats to what I am told is the optimum 60 degrees below zero storing temperature. Earlier than the 6:30 am it is now, the booth buyer was earlier out bidding up to 10's of thousands of dollars for prime specimens. Check out the modern giant band saw slicing whole tuna

Followed by the old school method of hacking out the bones with a hand sharpened axe like knife

to be thawed, sliced, packaged and delivered to fill the daily orders from the endless multitude of restaurant's demand.

**** Ponderings ****

As we wander the endless labyrinth created by one species to consume a myriad of others, the potential to be aghast highlights the human hypocrisy of needing and enjoying to eat. Yet so many turn a blind eye to the foundations by which our polished food is acquired. Whether it be plants or animals, each person decides to draw their personal line of edible acceptability but it makes little difference as everything is interconnected. It is just a matter of which illusion we choose to present ourselves as reality. Is it better to eat the critter or hack down it's habitat to create a field to grow vagatarian crops leaving the critter with an extinguishing fate, and what do they feed those plants we eat anyway? Not unlike the self and society censored parallels where humans publicly gloss over their underlying desires and act in patterns of sexual interaction while pretending to ignore the necessity and natural humanly allure, not unlike an amazing meal on a hungry stomach. Then I ponder the true and unavoidable cause of global warming to be caused by both sex and food. As clearly as we humans are creators of the unraveling predicament, we as a species have the power to halt man made global warming merely by convincing all humans to simultaneously refrain from sex or food and the problem would soon be enough as we extiguish ourselve. It does not take a rocket scientist to see that we as individuals and a race are incapable of treading upon this planet so softly as not to impact it. A quandary indeed unsolvable, given the acceptable choices. Then it becomes clear that trying our best as a species to attempt to slow down the eventual and unavoidable reality is really the only sensible option. How hard, how much and at what rate becomes a personal choice with global ramifications for each to decide and rally for or attempt to dictate. In the mean time, I am quite hungry and there is a fresh Sushi meal in my near future I predict.

**** End Ponderings ****

To Be Continued...

Dave Rat

Japan Airlines flight number whatever bound for Tokyo. My back hurts, my body is crooked and I went to a chiropractor on the way to the airport. Must have pulled a muscle and it knotted up like a twisted rubber band does when let loose in someone's hair. Have ya ever done that or had that happen where someone would twist up a rubber band and let it go in the small hair behind your neck? Ouch! I seem to have acquired a bit of a hitch in my get-a-long which is just what I need right now.

So I immediately pass out on the plane and wake up hour after takeoff to discover I am sitting next to a mid meal Japanese businessman who is a few drinks into the wind. Handing me the menu, "oh, which one do you order? Japanese meal o American meal?" he asks while perfectly combining al R's and L's in into a hybrid that makes me smile. "Well," still trying to hack through the haze, "Um, which on is that?" as I point at his food. While the presence of small rubbery flower shapes, chopsticks and bowls of brightly colored mystery globes clearly gave it away, he nearly shouts "Japanese meal!" Well, then that is what I will have then. Engulfed in excitement he yells down the isle for the flight attendant, orderes my meal and then proceeds to partake in what appeared to be some sort of joke telling session with her that suspiciously felt like it was at my expense.

"To drink?, um water, please," still trying to form words awaking from one of those slumbers that leave your arms feeling like lead. "Water? why water, no wine? why no wine?" he stares, loud and curious as can be. Ummmmm, well, how about a wine please. "Ahhhh yes, Cab Syllah, velly good!" And so it went, with him asking me each time I ate something if I liked it. I could only come up with two answers able to break the language barrier without insult; "yes, good" if I liked it and "hmmm, so-so" when it was beyond the realms of edibility. He loved "good" but really loved "so-so" and so once again he calls the flight attendant over followed by more laughing, a bunch of sounds I don't understand mixed in with the occasional "so-so" followed by more laughing. Wine and more wine and more laughing and I soon figured out that whenever he did not understand something he would invariably look forward as if think intently and nod his head and say yes, yes, ah yes. Then I realized that he barely had understood anything I had said the whole time except "yes" and "so-so."

His English was very limited and very hard to understand and yet still light years more advanced than my Japanese which is primarily relegated to names of Americanized sushi items, "hello" and "thank you." But that did not stop us from chatting away and in the middle of a jumbled question I hear what sounds familiar but not English. So I ask if he speaks Spanish, in Spanish and that is when the fun really began. Turns out he is a car parts distributor for Latin America and he can rock the Spanish. Though I may not have the syntax all down, I fair pretty well as well. So there we go, a common language all good as we both get yelled at several times to hush down. Too much fun and say hello to my plane ride friend Tsuchiya!

Landing at the airport, turns out that all that wine has left me a bit less chipper than the average bear but not so bleary to miss this after Leif pointed at it. Check it out, up there under the C-Clamped webbing is a birds nest with little birdy chicks in it. The webbing and triangular roped off area is to prevent poo bombs from taking out unsuspecting travelers. Cool stuff, I like the awkward mesh of different speiceis looking out for each other.

Next stop, hotel and the 'day of landing production meeting' where a bunch of delirious western roadies attempt to discuss things we pretend are important through interpreters with a sharp team of Japanese perfectionists that tend to be damn good at what they do.

Dave Rat