Khruangbin

New Yorker: ... Khruangbin plays a spellbinding twist on surf rock and soul that would be considered trite if it weren’t so appetizing. The band’s origins are delightfully nerdy: Speer bonded with the bassist Laura Lee and the drummer Donald Johnson over lo-fi digital rips of cassette tapes featuring obscure Thai funk bands from the sixties and seventies, which they’d downloaded from the cult blog Monrakplengthai. The cassette tapes catalogue stray releases from Thai musicians who, influenced by imported rock records from bands like Santana and the Shadows, blended the misty, coiling guitars of foundational rock and roll with the melodic sensibilities of their own traditional folk tunes. Many of the songs were used in Bollywood films, reaching wide swaths of Southeast Asian audiences. “Shadow music,” as the sound came to be called, is exhilarating in part for its traceable roots. Several cuts would fit seamlessly into your favorite countercultural film score, were it not for vocalists unspooling lyrics in their native tongue.

Speer, Lee, and Johnson would return to these tapes sporadically when they gathered in a barn in Burton, Texas (in addition to conferring via Skype when Lee briefly relocated to London), to write and record “Universe.” (The band’s name means “airplane” in Thai, but none of the members claim roots in the South Asian country.) ...

UFC training in Ko Samui

from THE REEM on Vimeo.

Great documentary of Overeem fighting in Boston and training in Ko Samui. The locations look very familiar to me even though I was last in Thailand almost 20 years ago. At the time I think I was the only guy on the island who knew any BJJ. I'm glad I didn't mix it up with any Muay Thai fighters, although I was tempted :-)

@26 min: great discussion by one of the trainers about the fast evolution of MMA techniques and tactics. @32 min, the attraction of the fight game.

On Japan

Readers of this blog have probably noticed that I regularly post about China and globalization. I've devoted much less space to Japan, even though I once lived in Tokyo as a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellow. While in Tokyo I dated an All Nippon Airlines stewardess, trained in MMA with local fighters and spent too much time in Shibuya (pictures above and below). I scandalized my physicist hosts by (a) visiting Thailand on the way to Tokyo and (b) investigating all kinds of weird social phenomena in my spare time (see below).

Below are a few old pictures, the first four from Thailand (Ko Samui) and the rest from Kamakura, Japan.





While in Japan I wrote a travelogue which I posted on the internet. That may not sound very radical, but this was back in 1997, long before the appearance of blogs :-) The travelogue covers topics like girlie bars, muay thai and expats in Thailand, Judo vs BJJ in Tokyo, physics lectures in Kyoto and at KEK, Japanese youth culture, etc. Any Hollywood producers or directors interested in making this into a movie should contact me right away ;-)

For those who are interested in Japan but don't want to read my stuff, I recommend the following.

Lafcadio Hearn: the grandfather of foreigners writing in English about Japan. Hearn arrived in Japan in 1890 as a journalist, eventually becoming professor at Tokyo Imperial University. See here for a collection of his work.

The blog Neojaponisme, edited by Harvard grad W. David Marx (an expat writer and musician in Tokyo) offers excellent writing about Japan, often informed by the latest academic research. For example, The misanthropology of the late stage kogal is about the kogal (video) and enjo kosai phenomena, which very much puzzled me when I was in Tokyo. (Having access to this research at the time could have saved me a lot of field investigation ;-) Kyabaio Japan is about hostess clubs, a topic covered with much less insight recently in the Times.