The Tokyo Beats

It’s interesting to note that the scientific phenomenon of a Black Hole is an area of space where the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing can escape after having fallen past the event horizon (boundary past which events can’t ever be observed – that which represents the maximum extent of the particle horizon – the extent of the visible universe. In his book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking describes the Event Horizon as “the point of which light is just barely able to escape.”). The name comes from the fact that even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light) is unable to escape, rendering the interior invisible, or black.

Besides being undetectable in their own right, black holes are a theoretical construct mostly left as-is by the world since the aptly titled 1979 Disney Classic The Black Hole starring Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine and the voice of Slim Pickens. Apparently director Gary Nelson purposely left the ending ambiguous so as to reinforce the awesome and mysterious nature of the universe. That or the ghost of Walt Disney came to him and told him that spacesuitless humans could survive the pressure and cold of space in a vacuum. It could happen…

Actually, in order to outwit a black hole, I mean to say in order to get out of a really bad situation with evil robots and the disembodied voices of Hollywood stars (Roddy McDowall also appears), your Escape Velocity (the speed it takes you to get the hell out) would have to be greater than the Speed of Light. Einstein explains in his General Theory of Relativity that since nothing we know of actually travels faster than 299,792,458 meters per second, you’re screwed. But what a cool way to die, right? Being ripped apart by the…hold on, we’ll get back to this part.

If Black Holes are undetectable- wait, is this a stupid question?- how does one “detect” them?

First, we know that black holes are once-massive stars that ran out of fuel (hydrogen) after which their own overweight gravity caused it to suck into itself (a rather fun friday night party trick), at a speed faster than light, therefore creating an area marked only by its extreme density and darkness. The fact is that a great majority of these gravitational anomalies have been found to exist at the known centers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Woot!

So are black holes slowly sucking everything into the center of galaxies universe-wide? Are we a glass-is-half-empty kind of contracting universe rather than a glass-is-half-full kind of expanding one? Is entropy the governing system of all we know? Is this at all connected to what I perceive to be my receding hairline?

Leave it to Braniac, but back in the 70s, Hawking figured out that, theoretically I should say, due to quantum-mechanical mumbo-jumbo, Black Holes emit radiation. Aptly-dubbed Hawking Radiation, the energy that produces the radiation comes from the mass of the black hole. Ergo black holes, like the nether regions of Polar Bear Club members, are shrinking. The rate of radiation increases as the mass decreases, so the black hole continues to radiate more and more intensely and to shrink more and more rapidly until it collapses, or as I like to think, unsucks on itself, something Marilyn Manson just can’t seem to grasp.

A cool effect of Black Holes is that if you had Liv Tyler waving to you on the Hawaii Luau Beach of the earth and you, studly Ben Affleck you, were slowly flying off toward the Event Horizon of the Black Hole that was World War II, she would be waving to you for the rest of her life and then some, because, due to the dual optical illusion of curved space and the time it takes said light to actually get to her sad cow eyes here on earth, she would never see you cross the threshold of the Black Hole, but merely watch you get tinier and tinier. You though, stud, would actually have been crushed long before you ever reached the Event Horizon, being ripped slowly apart cold and lonely in space long before you reached the Black Hole Singularity (the center of the Black Hole) by gravity worse than any Zero fighter plane piloted by an under-trained and over-amphetamined teenage Kamikaze pilot ever produced while crashing into the sea, earth or otherwise.

So what does all this have to do with Tokyo, Photography, and you? Is life-affirming Film and its antithesis (what is the antithesis of Film…Nonfilm…how could that be? I just blew my mind!), the Black Hole of Film? Nay, starman. Sit your burnt sienna ass down ass down Maxmillian. The fact is that to many of the infinite Afflecks floating through Tokyo-space toward their inevitable doom at the of hands of inescapable Kabukicho Yakuza gravity, the death knell of the Event Horizon represents only one microscopically possible future rather than a fixed boundary. Are we wrong to deny destiny? Are we perverse to fuck with fate? Do we deserve to be hose whipped? Most likely yes, but we may enjoy it. It’s your choice but just so you know, 5 out of 6 theoretical physicists agree, let the Tokyo Beats be your guide to the illimitable and untold cosmogonies Tokyo has to behold. Mahalo.

It used to be, back in the day, back when I was at my peak of madly shooting the night on the greasy streets of Kabukicho, that all I needed to express myself was a Nikon with a 45 caliber, er, millimeter lens, a few rolls of Neopan and a bottle of whiskey. That was back before the Yakuza took up kicking my ass for sport, with their pet cops standing idly by, watching for fun. It was back when I used to get my best pictures, back when my schedule let me shoot till dawn four times a week, back when it used to be fun.

After that, I frankly didn’t know what to shoot. Nothing was real, nothing fit, nothing got me jazzed the way the streets of Shinjuku used to. I even tried taking pictures of puppies, to see if the shock would click somehow. I’d get a nice enough picture now and then, but it hasn’t been the same.

So I work for a record company, a big, old Japanese company, in a division that’s trying new ways of finding and signing artists using the Internet, social networks, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, all of that Web 2.0 stuff.

We’ve found a few bands that the company is interested in working with and Ive grabbed the opportunity to do much of the photography for them. At the start it was a real “Hey kid, got your camera? Here’s your chance” moment and the company was happy with what I got with my M2 and a roll of black and white.

That led to doing the album cover, which was a bigger production, with a small rented studio and lots of people running around. The pictures were OK, but I found that what I really needed to do was to have the shot in my head long before I picked up the camera. I bought myself a set of studio strobes, reflectors and a big backdrop and have been studying how to create light, rather than rolling the dice when I was shooting on the street.

I have a shoot this morning, in fact—a young hip-hop group from Osaka, who’ve been working their asses off to get this chance. I know it’s a big chance for me as well and I’m appropriately nervous. It feels pretty good though. Maybe I’ll be able to pull of not just the picture we need, but also find a way of working that blows my hair back again.

I’ve got to get in the shower now and hop in a taxi. More later.

There’s a side street off Dogenzaka in Shibuya, up towards Maruyamacho, where there lurks a strange, strange shop.

It is one of the last of its kind, certainly in Shibuya. Once upon a time it had many competitors, even vending machines selling similar wares (way back before my time here, but I’m sure at least one of the other Beats can attest to the truth of what I say – right Jim??;-) , that was before Governor Ishihara, the well know morally upstanding mayor of Tokyo decided the area needed cleaning up, but now it stands alone. Its hard to find, you have to know its there or you’d never suspect what lies within.

‘Rope’ is a used womens underwear shop.

I had heard fabels of its existence and being the naturally curious fellow I am, I began trying to discover its location. Purely in the interests of completing my cultural education of this land of the rising sun you’ll understand.

My wife (at that time still my girlfriend) discovered my quest and insisted she be allowed to accompany me, should we be able to discover its location. So one night we spent a few hours in the area asking the suited gentlemen on the street in that area if they knew of it. We got some pretty funny looks even from those open minded souls and most of them denied any knowledge of it, but eventually one kind fellow told us where it was, however, he informed us, it was late and Rope was closed.

Undetered we went back the very next afternoon, ascended the stairs and went tentatively inside.

The guy sat reading some kind of porno manga behind the counter looked briefly up, slightly puzzled by the cute little Japanese girl and the big white foreigner, mumbled something and then went back to reading his porn.

It was tiny, barely enough space to move around, but it was a treasure trove of used uniforms of every kind, with that distinctive smell of used clothes.

Towards the back we discovered what we had come for, a wall of video cassettes and clear PVC packets fronted with a picture of a girl taking off her underwear, and carefully folded inside each packet the underwear from the picture.

Would you believe our luck, there was a sale on!

Still, the prices ranged from 4 or 5000Y (50 bucks or about 25 quid) to 10s of thousands of Yen, each pair graded, so I am told, on smell:- the more pungent the more expensive.

(As a small aside, whose job is it to grade them? I have visions of some huge yakuza guy, in a plush office somewhere, sniffing panties all day, like “ok, 5000Y”, “hmm…..10,000Y” and “Oh wow! these ones are good!! I think I’ll keep these for my personal collection”)

While my accomplice distracted the seedy guy behind the counter I managed to fire off 2 shots. Neither of them was particularly good, but they didn’t need to be, I felt as if something dirty (in the sense of not clean) had seeped into my body and mind.

We left and walked down the stairs back to the street outside in silence.

Now, I pride myself on being a pretty open minded guy when it comes to that kind of thing, I’ve seen things that would make most people feel distinctly uncomfortable, like they’d crossed some invisible line and I felt nothing, but I have to admit I felt weird.

There is something, to me at least, wrong on a fundamental level with buying used underwear for sexual pleasure, no matter how good they smell.

Sure, there are much worse perversions and this one wasn’t harming anyone, but it gave me a disturbing insight into the psyche of the Japanese that I can’t seem to shake.

We walked away in silence, only discussing the shop a few hours later, both agreeing that it had made our skin crawl and made us feel more than a little seedy.

I’ve never been back inside although I have walked past many times (on the way to another secret place on the same street that I may well right a post about at some point) , Even this open minded guy has to draw the line somewhere.

I have to admit I do religiously scour the job pages tho, just in case that big yakuza guy ever decides he’s had enough, now there is a career I could dedicate myself to. ;-)

Welcome to the blog of ‘The Tokyo Beats’.

6 Tokyo based photographers, their photography and their assorted rantings on  everything from Photography to contaminated gyoza.