James Brown is not a brightly dressed Japanese man.

First of all, James Brown really needs to groom himself prior to beating people. His mug shots are getting just plain embarrassing. Is this the smooth King of Soul we all know and fear? I think not:



So last night, had a band rehearsal up in North Hollywood at a studio space up there. Afterwards, we wanted to go out for a quick beer... we ended up at this place called "Tokyo Delve's," thinking, "Hey, we could get a Sapporo here at this nice quiet sushi bar." Little did we know that this place was total drunken loud bombastic banzai kamikaze patrons-dancing-on-the-tables sushi-chefs-singing-disco-hits type of place. Seriously, it was like walking into a different dimension. I can come up with a few ways to describe the place -- "Chuck E. Cheese meets Studio 54," "Jackrabbit Slim's for the culturally ignorant" -- and none of them have the word "sushi" in them. It was hilarious! And as we spoke (this is me, drummer Nanda and bass player Mario), I decided that working at this place is pretty much the equivalent of coming to LA to act and ending up in porn. I began to wonder if "waiter at tokyo delve's" has a similar suicide rate to "valley porn coke addict." Then a waiter came over to chat with us and, sure enough, he moved here 6 years ago from the midwest to act, and the last couple of years he's been screaming "are you ready? ARE YOU REAAAAADDDDY?!?" over the microphone from the makeshift/pseudo- dj booth at a startlingly inaccurate "japanese" restaurant in North Hollywood. Suddenly I felt very sad, so I talked to him about his acting and he said it was going well, and we had a nice little chat.

All that being said, it was actually fun. It's kind of reminiscent of all those tiki parties our parents went to in the 70s. kinda like, "No matter how you dress this up, we're really just getting drunk," only they got drunk around a lot of wicker and citronella. Well, in this case, you get drunk in the general vicinity of brightly dressed Japanese men and raw fish. When the entire restaurant -- and i mean everybody -- stopped eating, stood up, and started dancing, I thought, "Wow, that's something." 10 minutes later, when it was still going on except now people were on top of their chairs and dancing provocatively with their friends, sometimes falling off of their chairs, i thought, "Wow, this is really sustained!" Then, when the waiters and sushi chefs started doing this hide-behind-the-sushi-bar, run-around-the-room and start "the wave" thing, I thought, "That's it, I'm bringing a group of people here."

Anyway, that's life here. Now that Skye is traveling so much for work, I hardly see her. Must.... see... Skye!

-M

Scan This

Well, been quite busy with a lot of freelance projects of late, so not so much time to write. This weekend promises more of a chance for that, but, you know, we'll see. For fun, I scanned this postcard that Skye and I had made at her company Christmas party. It seems that Activision has the best taste in food and drink -- even in hand-rolled cigars, which neither of us could get halfway through (but we hear they were great!) -- but somehow, this guy with this hilarious postcard-making machine got in. You could get your photo taken in front of the Hollywood sign, on the beach, or... I don't know, in front of a still from the Secretary of State's colonoscopy, whatever. Skye and I went with the anti-prohibition theme (click the photo for a larger view):

Anyway, hope all is well with everyone. More later,
-M