Unlike China, France does not try to block my access to LiveJournal. Perhaps this means that I will write a bit, with minimal mention of the dieu-awful exchange rates, during my week-plus stay in Paris.

I am going to put Lollapalooza's worst foot forward to get it out of the way. A huge crowd of people, in really hot, humid weather, standing/milling/dancing in a field, smells a lot like cattle. Or maybe it's not that cattle smell particularly bovine when gathered together. Maybe it's that, like us, they smell mammalian. In any event, there were moments, especially when the wind would abate, that Grant Park had some serious zoo-grade human stinkage going on. Still, the music was pretty good.

Wooed by the prospect of 80s animated icon immolation, and, frankly, shade, I wandered early on into Kidzapalooza to see Care Bears on Fire. They have a silly name for a reason; they are fourteen years old. They sound it too, pop punk that doesn't even try to hide its white middle class concerns, which I guess is at least honest. With junior high school anthems like "You Can't Make Me," it's hard to say more than (1) it's cool that your parents let you do this, (2) you are far better role models, I suspect, than Hannah Montana, and (3) you're from Park Slope, of course you're from Park Slope. No bears, caring or otherwise, were lit on fire.


Lykke Li was a highlight of the afternoon, and not simply, though partly, because it was the only time beside CBoF that I could get close enough for a decent view of the stage. Li is a part of the ongoing Swedish invasion into indie music in the U.S. Though produced by either Peter, Bjorn, or John, I forget which, she has far more edge than any of P, B, & J's hooky poppy music. She likes to punctuate her stage persona by banging frantically on cymbals every now and again, and her voice has a perceptible hip-hop attitude to it which reminded me alternately of M.I.A. and Lady Sovereign though she is clearly neither related to the Tamil Tigers, nor an idiot. I think she just wants us to know she's from the hards streets of Stockholm. (Truthfully, she lead a rather peripatetic childhood, but the idea of her speaking the truth from Helvete's Kitchen, Sweden is way more amusing.)


Tool wrapped up the evening. Salted and preserved in my own dried sweat, I opted to watch them rather than really experience them in any all-encompassing concert going way. I found a seat on the small hill on the far side of the field from the stage and enjoyed the show, relaxed and recumbant, from a great distance. I could sing-along to myself, especially given that Maynard et. al. still do a number of songs from Ænima in concert. It was lovely. It also occurred to me that this was the same field where I saw Obama on election night. Beware about singing of California sloughing into the ocean, Maynard. We'll need the electoral votes and fundraisers for 2012.


Day 3: Lou Reed: how worse is he for wear?

All Praise be to Jojo for improbably being the 931st texter in a WXRT free Lollapalooza tickets contest.

All Praise be to Jojo's brother, who has no nickname so we shall call him The Bunchberry Maven (that's for the Mainers), who suffered Free Stuff Amnesia and planned a trip for this Lollapalooza weekend.

Double All Praise be to Jojo for thinking for some reason I might want B. Maven's ticket.

Way back when Lollapalooza started and was sub-/counter-culturally relevant, I listened to music that was sub-/counter-good, or at least had passed its expiry date. My first teenage concert, I am proud to say, was Midnight Oil, but there were many missteps to follow. I'm looking at you, Steve Miller. [shudder] Still, we had a brief (real brief) discussion about whether Lollapalooza is/was our generation's Woodstock. Bonaroo was offered up as a better alternative, and one with a far hippier pedigree, but it's not about being the same as Woodstock, only about being the correct answer on a Miller Analogy Test. I went in search of similarities:

• Mud. 
• A man sucking on suspicious looking (i.e., possibly drug laced) lollipops (he had a toolbelt of these lollipops and was handing them out leading me immediately to suspect he was spearheading his own Electric Bubble Yum Acid Test) collapsed onto me, and subsequently into the mud, during The Decemberists set.
• Supremely ugly-ass bootleg tie-dye Lollapalooza t-shirts being sold by illegal vendors on the sly.
• Over-crowding.
• The month of August and a year that ends in 9.

The are plenty of stale observations that posit this as the anti-Woodstock, such the corporate sponsorship of every square inch of Grant Park and the fact that concert-goers are served and protected by the very same constabulary that became a key pall-bearer for the Sixties coffin in 1968. But those are thoughts I had before I entered the park. The silliness of the comparison really came into focus when the first band I saw was the insufferable Ben Folds playing their self-effacing sing-alongs about the Plight of the Crooning Caucasoids. Thios
This shoudn't be a grumble-fest about Lollapalooza. It's better to have festivals like this than to not. Good for the fans, the musicians, and the city, if less good on the wallet. Plus, Of Montreal (one of my favorite bands both for their carnivalesque stage shows and grotesquely over-literate lyrics) covered Bowie. So, let me sum up Day 1 with my Number 1 learning: Converse All-Stars are a horrible choice of festival footwear. Write it down.

Day 2: No Age, deciding between Lykke Li and TVOTR, Animal Collective, Tool, and trying to sneak my SLR into the park so I can take some decent pictures damn it.

Complex culinary histories tend to yield restaurants that are genred. In the United States, for example, we tend to categorize our eateries along ethnic lines, with the notable exceptions of BBQ joints, bar & grills, fast food, and the like. It’s all part of our we-call-it-a-melting-pot-but-it’s-really-a-salad-bowl culture. Japan certainly has its fair share of ethnic restaurants (though don’t go looking for Mexican because there is not a burrito or chalupa to be found), but the primary organizing principle is cooking method.

My eating experience in Japan, while delicious, was not quite comprehensive. I was restricted by several factors. First was work. I generally had to eat wherever the job took me, usually within five blocks of my hotel in Shinjuku. Also, relating to work, we have an unofficial moratorium on street food. No one likes a strange ethnographer in their home with the runs. It's just awkward. Then there was the language problem. When without a translator, we were forced to fend for ourselves, and by “fending” I mean, look for English menus or, barring that, plastic food models to point at. Limitations aside, I can say for certain that maki is not sushi and not a single piece of chicken teriyaki passed my lips.

Sushi


Probably the least interesting thing that I ate in Japan was sushi. It was delicious, mind you, fresh and buttery and generally far superior than anything one can expect to find living 700 miles from the nearest ocean. I did stray from my usual orders, often because I had no idea what I was asking the waiter for, but never got further afield from my Chicago norm than a raw clam or sea urchin roe. Mostly I gorged myself on deep wine-colored tuna and any and all eel I could get my grubby American hands on. This actually worried one of my Japanese cohorts at a work lunch. She feared that, as a foreigner, I had mistakenly ordered something so slithery. They don't have those at Mickey D's. I dropped the word unagi to reassure her, but, always mindful of being a good host, I think her fears persisted.

The main difference, other than the obvious one of quality, between American and Japanese sushi is the lack of maki, the above photo notwithstanding. It is a much simpler, and perhaps, refined, dish there. I saw no fishy fusion hybrids, "Tropical Makis" with avocado, jalapeno, and mango. Mostly it was a expertly cut slice of fish on a lightly vinegared fist of rice. Though I did come across one instance of wheatgrass sushi that appeared without explanation. Other than being a non sequitur, it is not worth mentioning.

The one gimmick, of course, was the conveyor belt, kaiten-zushi. Like all fast foods, it was not as good as its higher priced cousin. However, there is something comforting for the foreigner. That something is that fact that you don’t need to order anything, except for a cold and monstrously portioned Asahi to be shared among friends. You sit at a counter and grab the plates that look best, or at least those identifiable to you. No pressure, no embarrassment of being rendered mute by an incomprehensible language. As an added bonus, you get to stack each successive plate into a tower that dwarfs those of the Japanese diners, reassurance that you are an American and proudly stuff yourself as such.


Yakitori


Meat and sticks go together like a horse and carriage. I think that’s how the old song goes. It is an accessible type of cooking and readily recognizable, though the line between chicken and chicken gizzard may be blurred to the naked eye, putting off the preemptively squeamish eater. It’s all grilled and lightly seasoned, making for a light meal where many non-sushi items end up fried. Though, truth be told, we did order tender fried octopus as an appetizer on our yakitori excursion. It’s all part of a balanced meal.

If you hold the not-entirely-unfair prejudice that no part of the animal is off limits in Asia, then order veggie yakitori. The eggplant is delicious and I even ate some sort of marinated mushroom which, I’ll admit, made a dent in my long-standing anti-fungi armor.


Tempura


You all know about tempura, so I don’t need to tell you about it. I do have a story though. One evening, on a recommendation, we went to a tempura restaurant in the bowels of the nearby Hilton. The meal came out in several courses. The sake was cold and all was going swimmingly. Before the final round of the fry up, the waitress and the chef came over to our table, each carrying a shallow metal dish. They were grinning broadly, either out of pride or a mischievousness from freaking out foreigners.

In the dish lay our soon-to-be next course, alive, though perhaps not well, existentially. The chef poked the shrimp on his tray, either to show it was still frisky and fresh or to prod it into begging its hangman and hangwomen for mercy. Not one to go down without a fight, the shrimp took the chef's urging as a cue to make a break for it. It leaped out of the tray and began scuttling across the rug to sweet sweet freedom. The prisoner was quickly apprehended to meet death by [ahem] lethal convection.



Kushiage


Izakaya

Wondering what the oddest thing I ate was? I'll give you a hint. When I told my co-worker she exclaimed, "You ate Shadowfax?" Geeky, but funny response.

The izakaya is the Japanese bar and grill: loud, smoky, and serving up lots of booze and arterially unfriendly foods. A few years ago I was in one in Vancouver, Guu with Garlic, and I guess that it was pretty authentic. I met up with my friend R in her old neighborhood of Shimokitazawa and hit the izakaya as a prelude to karaoke, just a Saturday night on the town in Tokyo.

Fried tofu (tofu is magical in Asia), potato salad with roe, grilled octopus, pork skewers, sharply pickled Japanese eggplant, spring rolls as an affirmative action roughage inclusion, beef carpaccio, and...horse...raw horse. I have no problem eating horse. If I am going to eat a docile cow or an adorable lamb or a badass elk (what's a good elk adjective?), then I have no moral ground to stand on for not eating the noble equid. I do, however, wonder where they come from. I have read that older horses are slaughtered and exported from the US, but this didn't seem tough enough. Sorry Shadowfax, if I am going to eat you I should at least get your story straight.



Ramen


Street Food


Dessert


The Western sweettooth has some tricky waters to navigate in Japan. Beautifully packaged and presented, the actual substance of a given treat can be a mystery if you can read descriptions. Texture especially is alien. There are airy cakes and rich chocolates, but also worlds of mochis and jellied...jellies. The mochi is wonderful. In the US we have been introduced to mochi as a kind of Japanese ice cream surrounded by a squishy shell. It is delicious in its own right. In Japan, it's more of a squishy pastry, often green tea flavored and occasionally filled with a chalky cream. It's chalky in a good way, because the Japanese are just that good.

The most overly decadent of the sweets were the crepes. Dotted about Tokyo are crepe stands, not filled with the refined jellies and nutellas of the West, but crammed with chocolate, caramel, cinnamon, coconut, or whatever, and obviously topped with a massive cloud of whipped cream. The one below was born to fill a late night yen after my izakaya/karaoke night.


Tapas

OK. Tapas? Really. Well, it's not Japanese per se, but the dully named (or maybe dully translated) Tapas Dining provided what may have been the tastiest dish I had in Japan. This is no fault of Japanese food, but rather praise for Japanese chefs. As my co-worker said repeatedly, "Another reason why they're better than us." By implication, they must also be better than the Spanish.

The service was questionable, but the food was delectable. Even the most bizarre dish, raw eggplant stuffed with mint and dusted with sea salt, was interesting. The picture below, octopus and shoestring potatoes, both broiled in ample butter was unreal. The butter browned and the octopus, often chewy, seemed to have replaced any sinewiness with that very butter. They are better than us, especially in the kitchen.

Minor my-own-horn-tooting intro: My name appears in legitimate print exactly once. Well, there is an EH is a book called Evil in Paradise. He is some kind of county commissioner embroiled in a scandal for accepting a shady loan from a developer. Also, you can search the New York Times archive and find that I share a name with a vaguely successfully and long-dead racehorse, but my name, referring to me, appears in legitimate print but once.

Way back when I was an undergrad, I worked as a research assistant for Prof. Ted Bestor. My job was to dig up info on fish markets on the American side of the North Atlantic. Embarrassingly, most of what I knew about fisheries going into the project was what I’d gleaned from Billy Joel’s song “The Downeaster Alexa.”* Over time, I did learn a number of non-Joel-related and surprisingly fascinating tidbits about the politics of fishing, the collapse of the North Atlantic cod stocks, and the gender conflict that ensued when fishermen in Maritime Canada were forced to abandon the sea and started spending way too much time in the entirely female space of their homes. Near as I can tell, nothing I did contributed much to Bestor’s own work, but I am mentioned along with dozens of other research assistants in his ethnography, Tsukiji.

As soon as you enter the gates of Tsukiji, you have one thought: I am going to die, or at least be paralyzed. There will be some sort of grisly accident involving you and a speeding fish courier. The streets of the Tsukiji neighborhood are reasonably quiet at 6 am, but inside all is chaos, for the visitor at least. In truth, it is highly choreographed, workers focused on their tasks of zipping around on motorized carts laden with seafood, packaged and destined for one of the hundreds of loading dock spots where trucks wait to take them closer to their final destination. At intersections and while crossing aisles and streets within Tsukiji, these drivers have no interest in your curiosity about the inner market. To get there, you can play a game of fish market Frogger, but at your own risk. They don't care one way or the other.


I mentioned the inner market. That's because Tsukiji is organized into four basic parts: the outer market, which is essentially retail, an inner wholesale market, auction houses, and loading areas and delivery byways that occupy any and all spaces in between. The easiest way to give you a sense of how things work at Tsukiji would be to follow the route of the fish themselves. The king of those fish is the tuna. They are huge in bulk and fetch huge prices, thousands of dollars for the finest catches of the day. Lucky for me, they are also the most photogenic.

All of the seafood get an early start. Though it is on the water, Tsukiji's present location is more of a historical legacy than the result of logistical strategy. Fishing fleets do not dock at the market, but elsewhere in the Tokyo area where the fish are offloaded into trucks to arrive at the market hours before dawn.

The tuna, when they arrive at Tsukiji, are brought into one of the market's six auction houses. The houses are no Southeby's, rather they are basically giant fish hangars that serve as the inner arc on the bayside of the market. Once they are taken off the trucks and laid out, frozen solid on the auction house floor, a small piece of skin is cut off below the head so that buyers can inspect the quality of the meat as the inspect the day's catch. What they look for in a top-notch fish is a mystery to me, but that judgment can affect prices around the world.


Though we arrived at 6 am, the auctioning was in its final moments. Still it was impressive: a cement floor covered with these frozen torpedoes that created a low-lying fog. There is a faint resemblance other trading floors: many buyers wear hats that indicate who they are buying for and auctions are conducted with their own inscrutable set of symbols. Each takes less than 30 seconds. There are, after all, a lot of tuna to get to.


Once a tuna is sold, it is marked with a read paint...


...and loaded on those motorized carts whose main purpose is to deliver the fish to trucks or to vendors in the wholesale market. Running down tourists is only a secondary function.


Some of the tuna go onto waiting trucks for destinations unknown, some to other markets throughout Japan, but others will head to Narita Airport to be flown overseas. A number of tuna stay behind, to be expertly sliced and diced for purchase within the wholesale market by retail fish mongers, chefs, or even just ordinary citizens of Tokyo looking for the freshest of the fresh.


The slicing and dicing may be expert, but not at all dainty. Some of the giant fish, being still frozen, are buzzed into cudgel-sized wedges with band saws. The tuna are defrosted and are carved into deep red hunks using two-foot-long knives. As the knivesmen go about their business, most ignore the tourists and prefer to concentrate on retaining all of their fingers. Others take not of your camera and give you a look that lets you know that the difference between filleting a fish and an American is negligible. You move on.


It takes no time at all for the tuna to go from fish-shaped to something we are more familiar with. There are somewhere around 1700 wholesalers in the market. Among those dealing in tuna, some offer only bulk for other mongers and restaurateurs and others prepare smaller portions ready for searing or sushi.


Typical retail market streets are not only crowded, physically and visually, but are cacophonous with sales pitches and blaring speakers, not to mention those chatty shoppers. At Tsukiji, there are no hawkers, no eager sellers giving you spiels and samples to get them into your stalls.

With all of the competition, you would think that there might be motivated selling, but Bestor's ethnography (not to mention my previous blog post) may give some clue as to why it's unnecessary. Like other business transactions in Japan, many of the sales are relationship-based. The wholesale businesses are often family affairs, with the men up front and the women at small booths in the back of each stall handling the money. Some of these businesses go back generations and long-term connections take precedence over browsing on price. In fact, shopping for the best deal is no easy feat. There are no prices posted, they are actually contingent on the relationships. Regular customers get better prices, prices that are complete opaque to browsers because they are often hashed out in code. The code is also explained in Bestor's book, if you want to try to fake it.

There are two really fun aspects of markets for me. One is the commerce and, as I've tried to convey, that is manic. Then there is the array of wares. Though hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of seafood move through Tsukiji, most vendors only offer a handful, some only one. Some are familiar (stacks of whole fish), some are more exotic (geoducks always look exotic to me), and some are just gruesome (conger eels swimming in water bloodied by their already-filleted brethren). Allow me to offer my pictures....Oh, and it didn't smell fishy at all.**




*As a side note, the Downeaster Alexa was Joel’s boat named after his daughter with Christie Brinkley. I once saw the DA, in dry dock, probably awaiting its fate during Joel’s and Brinkley’s then-ongoing divorce.

**One of my favorite quotes about how fish should really smell is from an interview with Jethro Tull frontman, Ian Anderson. Anderson was discussing his salmon farm in a radio interview. He said fish do not smell at all. They should smell like the sea, "like a mermaid's armpit."

I left out the second half of my study of pigs' feelings on eating soup.

Happy to eat soup:


Grumpy about eating soup:

This is a post about a ridiculous theory.

“I don’t think I know of any Japanese Marxists,” I thought. That’s right, I was in a city of  boundless scrumptiousness, sensory overload, and a municipal addiction to cuteness and I was worrying about whether the unseen disaffected wile away hours overanalyzing “Theses on Feuerbach.” I may not be the happy-go-lucky traveler I thought I was. I don’t actually know for certain that Japan produces fewer Marxists per capita than other industrialized countries. It's an assertion that cannot even pass a truthiness test. I didn’t research it because I don’t care about its veracity. That’s why I am a failed academic. I just thought about.

Once I was convinced that no Marxist had ever set foot on Japan’s soil or breathed its air, I naturally started wondering why. Aren’t there economic inequities to rise up against? Is their labor so special that surplus value isn’t being exploitatively extracted from it daily? Don’t their college dudes delude themselves into thinking they’ll get laid solely based on the prominent display of all three volumes of Das Kapital on their bookshelves? I would get to the bottom of this. My solution to this problem was elegant in its simplicity and complete irrelevance. The secret to Japan’s Marxistlessness lies in its presentation. Bear with me for a minute. You’ll need to if you want to get through this.

One of the keys to Marxist theory is the good ol’ commodity fetish. The idea, you probably know better than me, is that economic systems have evolved to essentially dehumanize production and trade. People have been alienated from what they create because they sell their labor for money and consume by the exchange of an abstraction, money. Products and trade, rather than being the consummation of human relationships, have been rendered impersonal, or maybe it's apersonal. The basis of economics and societal survival has become about the use-value of objects rather than the social value of the exchange itself.

Now, Japan is a capitalist society and the yen is just as much as an abstraction as the dollar. Why should they be special? Well, I’ll tell ya. Certainly the same processes of production alienate the farmer or the miner or the scientist from the end product of his labors. However, the human element is reintroduced at the end of the supply chain through the Japanese art of presentation...or so goes my theory

Japan’s corporations vie for the title of Most Depersonalizing Social Structures ever. They are known for possessing rigid hierarchies and certain rights and obligations (read: deference or acquiescence and respect) are conferred upon employees based on their position within said hierarchies. Normally, these would be alienation Petri dishes, subsuming individuality by the abstraction of the position and status. Man, it makes me want to smash the state, to take back the means of production as a human and not a title. Grrrr. Not so, say the Japanese. Relationships reign supreme when conducting business.

There is plenty written about this, including in my former professor’s monograph on the Tsukiji Fish Market, which I’ll be blogging about soon, but there is no need to go into details of obscure corners of Japanese trade. All you need to know is that business doesn't run in Japan without the face-to-face, the in-person presentation of self. And the notion of presentation is evident the second you meet a businessman.

The creation of relationships is not taken lightly. The exchange of business cards, for instance, is an elaborate ritual in Japan. Don’t you dare toss them across the conference table, and Jeebus have mercy on your soul if you write on the back of it. First, you have to bow, a lot. It's not a constant thing, like the metronomic davening of an orthodox Jew. It's more like punctuation, required by the grammar of the meeting to ensure the right emphasis and clarity of the gettin'-to-know-ya message. If the bowing is the punctuation, the actual exchange of cards is the semantic and pragmatic content rolled into one, the content of the message and the cues that give it context, namely a context that says "We are starting a business relationship with respect."

First, get your card out of your specially made, and possibly bullet-proof, business card case. Facing your new business friend, take the card with two hands, thumbs and index fingers gripping the upper corners and hand it over. Your new friend will take the card, gripping it in a similar manner at the bottom. Stand there for up to sixty awkward seconds. While you are standing with nothing to do, but stand, your friend is staring intently at the card, occasionally glancing at you to make sure everything checks out. Now it's his turn. Take his card in the accepted manner of a card receiver. Stare at it. Try not to do so blankly even if it is in Japanese and you are clueless as to whether he is a CEO or an assistant to the janitorial administrator. When your eyes begin to cross, bow some more. Repeat with everyone in the room, no matter how many people there are. Now you've dealienated yourself and business can begin.

Fine. Business people are the powers-that-be, right? What about if you're a regular ol' consumer?

Walk through the bottom floor of any of Shinjuku’s department stores, Keio, Odakyu, it doesn’t really matter. All of the stores basements are dedicated to the same thing: food. Immediately you are struck by three things: everything looks delicious, you have no idea what any of the food actually is, and there are about 13 people working for every 10 feet of counter space. But not only is everything beautiful, it is elaborately laid out. And should you choose to buy something, like one of those lip-smacking potato croquettes that became my daily snack by the end of my visit, you will get something elaborately wrapped, more a mantel piece object than a greasy sinful pleasure.

This is my point, there is an artistry to being a consumer in Japan. (Note: to a foreigner it is a beautiful and unnecessarily indulgent artistry. While in Japan I actually received a hit on my flickr page from someone searching "wasteful japanese packaging.") Where there is artistry, there must be an artist, usually one of those 13 counter attendants you notices when walking in. So, your croquette or whathaveyou has been defetishized by the implicit human artistry of the presentation and sometimes explicitly by the act of art-making (i.e., wrapping your croquette) before your eyes. Marx is stopped at the border again.

So, there you have it: Japanese Rituals of Presentation at a Marx Repellent. Now I am free to do a little internet search...wait a sec while I perform a little googling...searching...searching...and we have 889,000 hits for "Japanese Marxists." Hmmm. Better touch this entry up before I submit it for peer review.

Based on an unofficial survey that I never actually conducted, visitors to Japan expect to see three things: robots, Toilets of the Future, and teenagers dressed like freaks. Taken together, this trinity showcases the country's futuristic side, tempered with a human vulnerability, and, of course, an alien bizarreness. I would’ve included Godzilla in that list, but I don't want to stereotype.*

My robot exposure was easy. All it took was the push of a button, which is always a plus in the world of automation. The first time I turned on Japanese television there it was, a robot making omelets. His eggy creations weren’t particularly adventurous filling-wise, but he was fluid flipper, and he washed his hands when using the restroom. Based on the [human] host’s exaggerated “mmm-mmm” face, the om-bot’s recipe was a success.

As for the toilets, prepare to drop trou, a future of luxurious excretion awaits us all. The heated seat and unfathomable permutations of bidet settings in my hotel room were nice, but that was nothing compared to the space shuttle-esque shitter consoles I saw at the Toto showroom. It is a little creepy to have the automatic seat lifter kicks in when you walk by one, though. But while it would be fascinating to write more about how Japan makes potty fun again, I know you really want to hear about the kids.


Harajuku is one of Tokyo's teen it-neighborhoods. Along with Shibuya, it forms a corridor that is the Mecca of Japanese youth culutre, or at least non-anime/otaku youth culture. The main drags are loud with people and speakers blaring out from the stores. It is uniquely Japanese and yet demands stanchioned crowd control outside of the new Forever 21.

It’s mainest of main teeny-bopper drags is Takeshita Street. Little more than a double-wide alley between the Harajuku train station and Meiji Dori, on weekends, especially if the sun is making an appearance at this onset of the rainy season, it is completely impassable. Thousands of teens, and hapless tourists like me, cram Takeshita Street to browse all manner of resale clothing shop, boutique, and crepe stand. The going is slow, but the people watching is plentiful. Walking the stores' aisles is as perilous, navigation-wise, as attempting to stroll the stop-and-go human traffic of the street. There are some roomy higher-end retailers, but most stores have the packed-to-the-gills disorder that Americans usually reserve for dusty antique book sellers and attics of deceased relatives.
So, what do they all look like? To be fair, not everyone there is dressed extravagantly. Most Japanese fell within one standard deviation of normal by my unadventurous fashion calculations. Well, except for footwear. For women, that was one area of universally wild impracticality. Near as I can tell, every Japanese female above the age of ten is issued 10 pairs of improbably high heels. Given the general shortness and slightness of Japanese women, the ratio of 5 inch heels on such a tiny frame will surely be a chiropractic boon.

Never fear, there is a fair amount of costuming or "cosplay" going on. Girls have more variety in costume than men. (Why should Japan be any different?) This makes intuitive sense, though I haven’t done any real research. Let’s assume, like I did, that the elaborate dress of Japanese teens on the weekend is pushing against other rigid structures of cultural expression. This is not an original theory. Boys and girls deal with highly prescribed expectations, both in school and at home. However, girls not only have to deal with social pressures that demand order and conformity, but one of the most prevalent institutions in their young lives that molds such behaviors also sexualizes them to the point that it seems to eagerly invite perversion. I am talking, of course, about school uniforms.

If teenage girls are going to have institutional sexuality thrust upon them, it should come as no surprise that they might tweak this and have some fun with it in their spare time. The result is a number of personae, identifiable by their own uniforms, most of which are easy to find should you be enlisted to join a Harajuku scavenger hunt one Sunday afternoon. The most common seems to be the babydoll look. If you are not familiar, then you should get the picture on this one pretty quickly: sixteen year-olds dressing like twenty-five year-olds who are dressing like eight year-olds. Straightforward, but it does not exist in isolation. The babydoll exists on a continuum which eventually merges into a Victorian look of sorts, with more elaborate dress, layered and lacy, and often accompanied with a faux-fancy parasol. Then there is the so-called "goth lolita." This is a rarer teen subspecies and exactly as it sounds. There she is:

I was literally inside of Buddha. As refreshing as it might be that I have undergone some sort of Eastern conversion, the truth is that the second biggest Buddha in Japan is hollow and for 20¥ you can climb some steep, slippery steps and walk around inside him. Not much to see really, but it makes for a good opening line.

Given a rare sunny day in the rainy season, we decided to play tourists, on Sunshine Tours to be precise, and take a trip out of town to seaside Kamakura. At first glance, Kamakura is half Ocean City, NJ and half traditional Japan. With crammed sidewalks, plentiful fried sweets and ice cream cones, and a few token examples of gorgeous Japanese wooden firetrap architecture, it could barely be more touristy. What with the hydrangeas in bloom and a seeming Million Nikon March going on it actually couldn’t be more touristy. However our delightful sherpa, Yoko, gave us an informative history lesson, complete with visuals. Still, my soft serve was boardwalk worthy.


The first stop was the Hasedera Temple. It may date back to the 8th century, or it may not. Opinions differ and who am I to say? There is a top-notch legend to the place and everyone loves a good story. The star of the Hasedera show is a 30 ft. Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, though technically only a Bodhisattva.

It seems that a monk was wondering in the forests of Nara one day and saw a tree he really dug. Monks are just like everyone else; when he saw a tree he liked, he chopped it down. Not one to waste a good tree, he commissioned two statues of Kannon. One was enshrined in Nara and the other was set afloat in the sea. Kannon, drifted around for a while until he washed ashore near Kamakura. This was in 736. The Kamakurans, knowing this was far cooler than a message in a bottle or one of those rubber ducks, built Kannon a temple.

The other interesting thing about Hasedera, besides those damned hydrangeas, is that Buddhism and Shinto co-exist quite happily there. Not in that awkward way common in front of American city halls when a town puts up a Chrtistmas tree and then has to put up a Hanukah menorah and Kwanzaa, err, menorah because the ACLU freaks out. Nope. Inari and friends chill with Buddha and no one makes a fuss. Also fun was a cave of statuary and tiny Buddhist figurines. Spelunking for enlightenment.


Next stop was the Kotokuin Temple, home of the gigantic Buddha. Forty feet of raw oneness. Doesn’t get better than that. Actually this guy has his own story that involves the sea, but kind of the reverse of the first one. Kannon went to sea and eventually got a swanky house. The sea came to Buddha and he lost one.


Big Buddha was cast in bronze back in the 13th century. Not surprisingly, so temple building went along with him. It was a quite a project. However, Japan has a storied seismic history, and BB was kidding himself if he thought he was immune to his quiet corner of the Ring of Fire. In 1498, southwestern Japan was hit by the Meio Earthquake. Twenty thousand people died. BB was not one of them, but his temple was destroyed. BB’s stewards were bummed, but decided to transition him from an indoor Buddha to an outdoor Buddha. Then in 1923, during the earthquake that devastated Tokyo, Buddha’s base was destroyed. Unlike the temple, the base was later repaired. BB took it all with equanimity.


Lunch break and soft serve.

Our final stop was the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine, the most significant of the shrines in Kamakura. The original shrine was built in the 11th centiry, but it was about 100 years later when Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first shogun of Kamakura really gussied the place up. It may look like a holy place, but its fame is largely due to Minamoto’s aspirations to have an heir and establish a shogunate.


On the first part, he was successful. He built, as he was told to by a fortune teller of some sort, a beautiful, cherry-blossom lined road, called the Avenue of the Young Prince, to the shrine. It worked. His wife, who had been a champ at producing daughters, gave him a son. The direct legacy of the shogunate was far less successful. His line was done after twenty years of sons, grandsons, uncles and the like plotting to kill one another, and generally succeeding. Eventually, his wife’s clan took over and the era of the samurai began in earnest in Japan. Then it was time to catch the train back to Tokyo

Upon disembarking at Tokyo's Narita airport I was met at the gate by a sizable press corps. It is my first trip to Japan and I am, after all, the most famous person living in my apartment, but it seemed like a bit much. Turns out, the paparazzi were not there form me. They were actually there to meet another passenger on my flight, Nobuyuki Tsujii, a blind Japanese pianist who won the 2009 Cliburn Prize for Pianistic Excellence. Finally the hordes of journalists have seen fit to leave me in peace.

(I guess this will be the last entry in the much-slacked-off-from China backblogging effort. I’ve been back a few weeks now – actually, I have been back so long that I am back in Asia again – but no trip is truly a trip without some food porn.)

The rumors that you’ve heard are true, what is commonly referred to as Chinese food is not what is eaten in China. Shocking, I know. There is a resemblance, a relation in ingredients and flavors, but it’s often simultaneously simpler and heartier. No meal that I ate was capped off with a fortune cookie and the venerable General Tso was nowhere to be found. Oh, and I was rarely, if ever, hungry a half hour later.

The Chinese, however, do seem to be aware of what westerners see as their culinary tradition. At all of our enormous family-style group dinners there was always at least one overture made to the waiguoren palate, easily identifiable as the thing most fried and smothered in a telltale sweet and sour orange. I don’t want to disrespect. It was usually fish and always good.


Anthony Bordain I am not

Last summer I read a book called Extreme Cuisine. It is little more than a gastronomic gross out, perfect for little boys who waved earthworms at the girls and then grew up to be foodies. One of the great anthropological assessments in the book is that “Asians will eat anything,” a subtle insight. By all accounts it seems true, and that’s fine, but I wasn’t going to take them up on joining in. The street vendors selling eggs cooked with the chicken still inside is a fine place to draw a line, though there was some cultural exchange between China and my stomach.

Two of the less delectable things I tried came from one of mankind’s universal sources for disgusting digestibles: preservation. The need to keep things around a little longer has yielded decidedly mixed results. Any quest that gave birth to both bacon and rotted shark has had results that I would call decidedly mixed. The Chinese have their share of winners. I love Chinese sausage, for instance, but I wouldn’t call that adventurous. For one, I have had it before, so there would be no point going to China for it.

At one of the first breakfasts in Shanghai, MCZ and I began eyeing the “century eggs,” the breakfast fixture preserved in clay, ash, salt, lime, and rice straw. Mmmmmm. The result is a grey-green firm Jell-o egg. It smelled a little acrid and was more about texture than flavor, though I was not won over by either. With little to say about the taste, the interesting thing might be the century egg as metaphor: comparing the sunny, fresh American image of the egg with this sooty, smoggy, polluted Chinese incarnation…but maybe that’s not that interesting either.

Even natives refer to fermented tofu as “stinky tofu.” This is foreboding, and understated. Walking around Old Shanghai a fetid smell met us. A single stall selling stinky tofu can render half a city block uninhabitable. We had no desire to seek out its source, only to flee. Only a week later, in a restaurant in Nanjing’s Confucian Temple area, did we come face-to-face with the stank. These group dinners followed a simple formula: private dining room, family-style, food comes continuously for hours, some of it comfortable for the western visitors, a small few a little daunting.

Like a number of other preserved foods, stinky tofu’s sensory cues don’t inspire confidence. Namely, fermentation of the tofu is supposed to keep it from rotting, but it smells positively rancid. That tells me that maybe the whole preservation thing didn’t go so well. Or rather, the best we can say about it is, “It kept, but it’s a little sewage-y for my tastes.”

I wanted there to be more, but I never got around to eating shark fin or jellyfish, chicken feet or various pork organs. In our first night in Nanjing we ordered a small bowl of goose intestine. Not bad, actually. It was chopped to the equivalent of a medium dice and stir fried, just lightly salty and chewy. It didn't even occur to me not to like it, even after half the people I know asked the same question: “How do you know it’s clean?” The only other “crazy” offering was duck tongue, which, at least to my experience, is the most cumbersome and least rewarding part of the duck to eat.

Quack

Speaking of duck, you may have heard that I am fan. The un- or insufficiently initiated may think that the duck is merely a super-chicken. Any phylogenetic relation has no place at the dinner table. They are not birds of a feather. One’s plumage hides meat that, while bland, readily accepts sauces; the other’s, a stronger, fattier delicacy and a skin ready for the crisping. We were hell-bent on getting duck at every meal and in every form possible. No matter what we found, the Peking style is always king.


Xiǎo lóng xiā

I left China having learned one phrase. That hasn’t changed since I blogged about it.

A Dumpling of Genius

We had a you-are-what-you-eat eureka moment towards the end of our time in China: we were all going home looking a little more like dumplings than when we arrived. Breakfast dumplings, lunch dumplings, and dinner dumplings. Oh, and let’s not forget those dessert ones. Shrimp dumplings, red bean dumplings, sweet egg dumplings, and let’s not forget the pork dumplings, always the pork dumplings.

One of Shanghai's specialties is the soup dumpling. You can get a decent version of it in Chicago at Lao Shanghai. It's like an inside out comfort food, the soup in the dumpling instead of the traditional - and more logical - vice versa. Near as I can tell, it is made by freezing the soup stock and placing it with the meat (pork, of course) inside the dumpling skin. When you steam the dumpling, the frozen stock melts, creating a burst of flavorful broth, like Grandma's home cooking crossed with Freshen Up gum. The added bonus is that someone at the table inevitable forgets how hot steaming broth trapped inside a dumpling can be, creating a good laugh for all to share.

Just Porn

That's belatedly all from China. And greetings from Tokyo.

We had the last morning planned out perfectly. The Shanghai Museum did not open its doors until 9 am, and that was the mainest main attraction that we hadn't hit. Can't very well leave China without gazing at a single glass-encased Ming vase. No, siree. Until then, we wanted to get one more morsel of the city's flavor. We would grab a bite at the hotel, pick up some palatable coffee at the Italian cafe around the corner, and head for a walk in the park.

We had been to Fuxing Park on our first Sunday in the city before fieldwork started. There was nothing intentional about that first visit, it was a lucky find at the end of a nine hour walking tour of the city. In other parks we stumbled upon earlier in the day, we quickly noticed that Shanghai did greenspace right. The people seemed to use greenspace right too. Maybe I am projecting an Eastern ideal here, but in Chicago it seems that people use parks as mere staging grounds for their activities: picnics, jogging, drinking, ultimate frisbee, melanoma cultivation, whatever. In Shanghai, people seemed to be doing things with the park, rather than simply in it. If, in fact, the function and form of the park are more intimately intertwined, then there is more demand on planners and park designers. Perhaps that is what made them interesting to me, that they seemed much more nuanced as social and natural spaces. Or maybe that projection of an ideal that Asians commune better with nature is taking its toll on my rememberings.


In any case, it was a vibrant, ebullient place: old men huddled around card games and go boards, children fishing for goldfish in the pond, meditating souls stoically avoiding shutterbuggy tourists and strolling couples, another group of men in a field nimbly manipulating some sort of humming yo-yo, and seniors dancing polkas and waltzes together. Don't get me started on how fun the floating human hamster wheels looked. That's all well and good, we were told by some of our local project-mates, but the real fun happens on weekday mornings.



Mornings, Fuxing Park is an older folks scene. Not in the way a mall here is before any of the stores open. The park doesn't go in for that kind of doddering sadness that characterizes aging in America. Actually, if I were in a more polemical mood, this could easily be turned into a cross-cultural critique: judge a modern society treatment of the elderly based on where they are allowed to be active. In America, it's shuffling past the shuttered Sunglass Hut at 8:30 am; in China, it's in Fuxing Park.


I suppose that over time, the different groups staked out territory in the park. Winding our way on the paths in the parks, we were met with group after group of folks greeting the morning with some manner of exercise. Each seemed to have a leader or teacher, like a set of open air classes at a gym. Also, many seemed to be accompanied with music on a taped up boom box, cheesily upbeat seemed to be the preferred genre.

The specific exercises were wide-ranging: what I presume was all manner of tai chi (propless, with swords, with fans, etc.), light stretching, dancing, etc. Some of it required precision and deep concentration; in other cases it was less graceful and rigorous. What all of it seemed to do, without fail, was exude happiness. I am not one to use phrases like, "this place has a good energy." It may be perfectly true, but that particular phrase is just part of my idiolect. However, I don't know what else to call it. In Chicago, one might walk through a park at the same hour and see people preparing their bodies for the day by jogging, a generally solitary exertion. In Fuxing Park, the people, mostly older, kept themselves up as physical individuals, but did it socially. There was something amazing about it. Observing the aging and the active, my cynical American eye is trained to feel pity or revulsion at frailties. There it was just vibrant, and you couldn't help but sense it. It was downright joyful.

I don't have a good way to bring this post to a close. Maybe I should just say that "you just had to smile" isn't normally part of my idiolect, but, yeah, you kind of did.

The reinvention of neighborhoods in Chicago, you know, gentrification, is formulaic and tends to end badly. The story goes a little something like this: First, you find a major intersection to serve as a social and economic hub. The Six Corners in Wicker Park is a fine example of a successful one, Broadway and Lawrence in Uptown, less so. Briefly, interesting people move into the area, giving it a Bohemian feel. Alas, soon the edgy magnetism becomes too strong and others arrive en masse. Prices for housing and food are driven up. Identical boutiques take root. You are never quite sure how they stay in business. Many of the interesting pioneers move on. Forget about the original inhabitants that gave the area continuity and character; they have been priced out or marginalized. The condos dominate the landscape. Corporations usurp landmarks (e.g., Bank of America ousting Filter at the Six Corners). And finally you are left with a neighborhood that is something of a caricature of its earlier, hipper self. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Shanghai has its own model for gentrification known as Xitiandi. It's nice, just nice. There are some interesting shops and good higher end restaurants, but one has the sense that the evolution was not exactly natural. The sleek, comfy coolness is all too perfect. It feels like a planned community for yuppie invaders. The hipness of any neighborhood needs to be called into question when it links to "Hot Stores" on its official website. Image is unabashedly emphasized over character, but by the looks of it, it is thriving on that formula. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

If you are walking in the French Concession, there is an alley at 155 Jianguo Lu that you should probably turn at. It is utterly nondescript, but bear with me. Sure, there are few markings and it looks like a thousand other winding alleys in Shanghai – you do get a lot of winding alleys when not using a grid system like Chicago. Anyway, the turn is worth it.

At first, there appear to be a few storefronts in the distance, nothing much. Almost imperceptibly you start to realize that you are in a very different place, an alternative Shanghai. All indicators as to place, directionality, and scale disappear when you enter the maze known as Taikang Lu. Sightlines are too crowded to situate yourself beyond what you just passed by and whatever you find as you turn this or that corner. Unlike all of my other walks in this city, I could never grasp my cardinal bearings and any notion of how much ground I covered and how much more there was to see was distorted beyond meaning.


Information cobbled together from a restaurant menu and a few subsequent and painfully slow internet searches told me that Taikang Lu is a classic example of shikumen, a type of tenement design common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that is unique to Shanghai. (Well, the same menu informed me that the area is called “Tian Zifang,” but that name is of unknown origin.) The vestiges of poverty are still there, namely in aging residents who sit on wooden chair outside their backdoors and watch, unphased, by the shoppers and strollers. But these tenement dwellers of generations ago seem to coexist peacefully with the present.


The architecture of poverty has merged with an architecture of secrets. The result is an Escher neighborhood: a labyrinth of narrow alleys where everyday life, commerce, and Bohemia fold in on each other. And none seems to take center stage. A man locking up his rickety bike outside of his gate may be in the background as you peer into one of the innumerable tiny cafes. Or two women shucking vegetables in the alley out their kitchen door may be in the foreground of an art gallery you spot down an alley off an alley off an alley. Discovery can't help but be a pleasure. Spaces alternate from being lit by shadows, lamps, and the warm lights of deceptively sized restaurants. Stores, galleries, and, one assumes, the apartments above them are cramped, but this urban ecosystem runs smoothly and seemingly every space maximizes utility and your interest.



We browsed and spent in art galleries, dim bookshops, and cozy stores that sold anything under the guise of modern Asian cuteness. We found a Thai restaurant, much to the pleasure of the Thai traveler among us. It seemed passable from street level, but the hostess led us up a steep staircase of dark wood at showed us to a private balcony giving us a dusky view of the alleys and rooftops. We gorged ourselves on basil-redolent beef, a sweet and savory vegetable curry, prawn soup, a light squid salad, and shrimp cakes. We capped off the meal with gelato in a café. Never a huge fan of the real thing, I found the honeydew gelato the refreshing gem of their flavor lot.

This neighborhood enchanted me. It's what travel is for. We could have lost ourselves there for hours, but there was work in the morning. Still, those alleys make you want to stay forever and explore because you are certain that you can never possibly see everything. I felt it had no duplicate anywhere in the world. Who could duplicate something so physically confusing and fascinating?

As you turn and walk away, you hardly notice, but suddenly you are back in the rest of Shanghai, just like you were before. My co-worker summed it up best. Tian Zifang is like a fairy garden. You can bring your friends to the very same spot the next day, but in daylight you won’t find a trace of it. In the face of their doubts, you will swear it was there the night before, that you saw it with your own eyes, but all you will see is an alley off of a tree-lined block, just like some many others in the city.

So, I was about a week into my trip to China when all blog access disappeared. I was never able to get to LJ, but then at some point I couldn't get to Blogspot either. But I am back in the States and it's time to start on the backlog.

I am hoping to be able to blog while I am gone, but rumor has it that LiveJournal is not available on the other side of the Great Firewall of China. Here's hoping.

What makes a good traveler?

I ask because it's one of those questions that nag the sweet heck out of me. Others of this sort are: "What the heck is art about?" and "Is there a language that has no word for 'potential'?" I also ask because I am leaving on a jet plane. Granted it's for work, so the normal rules of the recreational traveler do not really apply, but it is the most 'other' place I've ever been, China. If I am going to make the effort to go so far, I might as well do it right, whatever that may mean.

Parsing the question a bit, I wonder whether people are born good travelers or is it something you learn. Nature vs. Nurture debates seem generally worthless, if a lot of intellectual fun, especially if you are like me and like to argue, frequently advocating for the Devil.

Re: such an argument about travel, there certainly seem to people who naturally see foreign situations as immerse and adapt opportunities. The minute you turn around they have made friends with the folks at the bar and, with a keen ear, picked up the key phrases to get around, and even a few shibboleths of the natives. And somehow they always sniff out the events redolent of local flavors that a visitor should only be able to happen upon by accident. Still, they must have honed their traveler's craft somewhere. An instinctual craving for new experiences may be in-born, but social skills are learned, even if they are necessary as a species. Like I said, worthless conjecture.

My own early travel education was not exactly robust. Trudging through Pennsylvania Amish country, a fog-shrouded schlep to Maine, a series of ludicrous divorce group therapy “camping” trips, and, of course, the obligatory tours of the finest shuffleboard courts of Ft. Lauderdale. That pretty much sums up my dependent years.

None of this is to say that my infrequent flying should be laid at my parents’ feet, evidence of neglect of my cosmopolitan development. Anyway, I would have been a nightmare to have in tow through the cultural centers of Europe or whathaveyou. I was a moody pain in the ass, stubbornly averse to new experiences in practice, if not theory. Art was lost on me until I was about 25 and decided that Magritte’s Ceci n'est pas une pipe must be about Saussure’s arbitrary nature of the sign. And, food-lover though I now claim to be, I was finicky as hell as a child, refusing to even acknowledge the genius of pizza until I was twelve. I did, however, once eat my own shirt (literally) in a bizarre act of protest and boredom during a drive down to Florida. Plus, I was a proud junior misanthrope. The art of making friends the world over wouldn't have stood a chance.

As an adult I have developed an intellectual wanderlust, if not a physical one. Basically, I love the idea of travel, but seldom commit to a major journey. The trips I have taken have been few, and relatively safe affairs. My failed anthropological sortie to Dangriga, Belize notwithstanding, I have gone to conservatively familiarish places and ceded the grasp of the local language to seemingly more able companions. So much for self-nurture.

It seems I've set up this post to be a sort of negative validation: Q: What makes a good traveler? A: Not evandebacle. But I think I may have asked the wrong question. It’s not about what makes a good traveler; the crux of my dilemma is what it means to experience a place?

I will be going to Shanghai, Foshan, and Nanjing over the next 2 1/2 weeks. When I return, I want not to have just gone there, but to have been there in some experiential sense. My job gives me an interesting leg up in this department. I will be visiting the homes of a number of ordinary Chinese. Can't get more of a cultural experience than that. That won't be enough. I want to taste and smell China, to find that shop which sells the most bizarre trinket I've ever seen, to photograph the people being the People, to discover the details of "that damned story evandebacle always tells whenever China comes up." Failing all that, "China's Best Metal Band" is playing in Shanghai my last weekend there. Behold: VooDoo KungFu and see ya soon.

Kudos Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman, you are a complete idiot.

In the wake of two reported cases of swine flu in Israel, the good deputy minister spoke out in favor of peace, love, and understanding by saying that this little bug(ger) should really be called "Mexican Flu" because the reference to pigs is offensive to Jews and their beloved Muslim brothers.

The wisdom of this speaks for itself. Stigmatize the geographical and not the Levitical source. Thus, I propose that, should somehow it be found out that the flu went from Israel to Mexico and not, as is likely, the other way around, the disease should be referred to as "Jew Flu" in both the medical and popular media.

Nothing jumpstarts a blog slump like some prognosticating. So without further ado, I bring you what will happen in the 2009 baseball season. No need to watch the games now. It's been my pleasure to end the suspense and free up your summer.

NL East – New York Mets
That the Mets bolstered their choke-happy bullpen with a man named Putz is somewhat unfortunate and should lead to a host of predictable crowd taunts and derisive back page headlines. Still, I am going to say that the third time’s a charm. The Mets will get a lead and keep it.

NL Central – Chicago Cubs
The most compelling reason not to pick the Cubs in this or any year is history.  The second most compelling reason is whether Carlos Zambrano can channel all that energy he spends berating figments of his imagination on the mound and become a Cy Young-contender. Coming in a close third is the oft-injurted/much maligned Milton Bradley. In light of the poor competition, none of these are actually all that compelling. A little seasoning for their starting pitching could make the Reds a factor for the Wild Card, but if the Cubs don’t run away with this the Wrigley mobs should forget the home-sweet-homey moniker and build a gibbet outside of the Friendly Confines.

NL West – Arizona Diamondbacks
Contractual obligations with East Coast Bias, LLC prevent me from actually knowing anything about the NL West. The division is full of teams that could conceivably make a run at the title, but no one blows me away. Or at least I suspect they wouldn't if I knew anything about them. I am really not feeling it with the Dodgers, and despite Peter Gammons telling me not to write off the Rockies, I cant go there either. The D-Backs have some really nice bats in the outfield and a great 1-2 punch on the mound, plus the peskily consistent Jon Garland penciled in as their #4 starter. Arizona should take the West and even be a thorn in someone’s side in the first round of the playoffs.

NL Wild Card – Atlanta Braves
This is an act of faith, namely a faith that you can’t keep a good organization down for very long. Bringing Tom Glavine home does nothing for me, but signing Derek Lowe and bringing Javier Vazquez into a low pressure market could bring them back to the playoffs.

AL East – Boston Red Sox
A sense of baseball morality prevents me from picking the Yanks, though their offseason was impressive. Hording superstars, unfortunately for the Yankees, is not going to be the deciding factor in ’09. The Rays, Red Sox, and Yankees will go punch-for-punch when it comes to marquee names. Lesser signings like Rocco Baldelli and Takashi Saito are going to be the ones that make the difference.

AL Central – Cleveland Indians
I like picking the Indians. I do it a lot and it never works. Still, with the clear flaws in the Central's other teams, and the solid additions of Cubbie cast-offs Mark DeRosa and Kerry Wood, I think Cleveland should run away with it. Now, I’d love to pick the White Sox because it makes baseball more fun in Chicago, but having Bartolo Colon penciled in as the fifth starter tells me all I need to know.

AL West – Los Angeles Angels
Can anyone beat the Angels in the AL West? No. Will the Angels be able to take down any of the Eastern Beasts in the playoffs? Also, no.

AL Wild Card – Tampa Bay Rays
There is the whole “the teams in the East will beat each other up” dilemma, but the Rays just have too much talent at the bat, on the mound, and in the pen.

World Series – Red Sox over Cubs
I don’t feel like the Cubs are going to be a great playoff team, but there is no one in the NL who should beat them. You know, kind of like the situation going into the last two seasons. If they make a play for Jake Peavy in a deadline deal, the Cubs could take it all, but I doubt it.

Given that my blog is lying fallow, this is the closest thing I have to being published right now.

(HINT: Look at the photo credit, not just the graffito.)