The Journal of Poorly-Explained Phenomena
On her blog, Rain says that this video audition for Stanley Kubrick is the funniest thing ever, and she may be right.
People in the comments keep going back and forth about whether it’s fake, which is missing the point. Either way, it’s awesome. (My vote goes for “fake,” which somehow makes it even cooler).
The neighbors’ Halloween party last night had an extended jam session on the bongos that lasted from about midnight to 2 or 3 AM. (The time change and my intense desire to go to sleep made it difficult to gauge). Once it was all over and replaced with the sounds of people in their early twenties right outside my window shouting about how drunk they were and how they had to get a cab, I was finally able to get to sleep and have some of the weirdest dreams.
The best part about my dreams is that they’re just weird enough to be marginally entertaining, and so obvious it’s easy to figure out what they’re telling me. Here are two of last night’s:
I have to do a project pitch of some sort for a company in China, but I don’t have any ideas. I realize I’ve been putting it off for too long and it’s time I have to turn in something. I spend a couple of days writing whatever comes to mind, then turn it in. The next day, the Emperor of China calls me into his palace and starts chewing me out. He says my ideas are totally lame and half-assed, and then, “With all your going-on about how great you are, I expected something really spectacular. But this is sub-standard work, mediocre at best.”
I stand there for a minute, thinking it’s not appropriate to argue with the Emperor of China, then finally speak up. I say that I never go on about how great I am, and he isn’t being fair. He says, “whatever,” and sends me away.
Then I’m at a mall, with a friend of mine from high school and another woman who I can’t picture or identify, but I know I have a huge crush on her. I split off from them to go to a Johnny Rockets-style restaurant in the mall, except it’s owned by Frito-Lay and all the dishes are Cheetos-themed. While I’m standing in line at a counter to place my order, I notice they have this weird lighting effect on everyone in line. It affects just your skin — not your hair or clothing — and makes it look like you’re made of Cheetos. I keep passing my hand in and out of the light beam, staring at other customers’ faces, and wondering how they did it.
I turn around and see that my friend and the other woman are standing behind me. My friend is really interested in the effect, but the other woman (who I still can’t see or identify) just mutters that it’s lame. She says she can understand why the Emperor of China thought it was a bad idea.
Incidentally, if you like reading other people’s dreams, the site Slow Wave by artist Jesse Reklaw has comic strips based on reader-submitted dreams.
I realize you’re supposed to finish a book before you write a book report on it, but 1) I’m really enjoying this one, and 2) I’m bored and want to virtual-talk to somebody, and c) who knows, I could die tomorrow, and everyone would be at the wake lamenting, “If only there’d been more time. Now we’ll never get the chance to ask Chuck if he enjoyed In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson.” (In case I drop dead while blogging: the answer is yes, I’m enjoying it a lot).
When I was reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, I said that I was really impressed with Bryson’s writing but was frustrated with how he handled the material. While a historian and magazine columnist writing about science didn’t work well for me, a humorist writing travel memoirs works great.
For starters, it’s about Australia. Who doesn’t love Australia? Satanists, that’s who. And possibly New Zealanders, which is just about the same thing. The impression you get from In a Sunburned Country is that the country has the most bizarre and inhospitable environment on the planet, with the friendliest people in the world trying to counter-balance that.
The book is also funny as hell. I was sold as soon as I read the passage where Bryson describes himself falling asleep in someone’s car:
Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside — tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air — decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling.
Reading that was the first time I’ve laughed out loud at a book since I first found Roy Blount Jr.’s stuff. And he’s consistent; the book is filled with genuinely funny passages; even when he goes for the corny or predictable joke, it’s hilarious.
The best surprise of the book for me is that it’s reminded me to drop the preconceived ideas I have about people. Not Australians, in particular — the country as described in the book matches pretty well with how I’ve always imagined it — but people in general. I was pretty dismissive of Bill Bryson’s books, figuring anything that popular can’t possibly be good. I assumed they were light, and easy to read (both of which are true, it turns out), and full of Country Home Companion-style heartwarming, wry humor. I imagined the target audience, like Bryson himself, were suburban mid-westerners in their 50s who had excess income and leisure time they wanted to fill with something mildly adventurous. In short, the CBS crowd.
That was dispelled the first couple of times he said “fuck” and described himself drawing a cartoon about salmon masturbating. It sounds as if all you have to do is cuss and make giggling jokes about sex to keep me entertained, and while that’s true, that’s not my point. In fact, my point is the opposite. We’ve gotten so used to the idea that comedy has to be “edgy” to be funny, that it’s become just as tired a stereotype as the opposite. I suspect that people are a lot less sheltered and tightly-wound than we imagine them to be, and when your whole schtick is built around shocking people, more often than not you’re just being boorish.
The real talent isn’t in taking it upon yourself to shock people out of their complacent Father Knows Best existence, it’s having the subtlety and nuance to recognize exactly when saying “fuck” makes the joke. I’m glad I was wrong to be so dismissive about Bryson; he’s a lot more talented than I’d assumed.
It’s coming up on November again, which means another International Taiko Festival in Berkeley and another post where I tell people they should check it out. The tickets are more than a little pricey, but it’s usually a spectacular show. If anybody out there’s planning to go, let me know so’s I don’t have to sit there by myself.
Until then, I’ve got the first of my home movies from Tokyo up on the interweb. I’d been hoping to see a genuine taiko performance in Japan, but didn’t know where to look. On one of my days off, I was headed through Yoyogi Park on the way to the Meiji Shrine, followed the sound of far-off drumming, and wandered right into the middle of the Tokyo Sri Lanka Festival. There I caught the tail end of a taiko performance on stage. I don’t speak or read Japanese, so I don’t know the name of the group that was performing.
The videos suffer a little from the compression, and the fact that I can’t hold a camera steady on account of my condition, but the basic idea’s there. Here’s their final performance (about 7 minutes):
and its encore (about 2 and a half minutes):
I’m way too old and disinterested to be getting into a “which console rocks hardest” battle, but I still read the videogame blogs and am bemused by the wackiness surrounding the Nintendo Wii.
Specifically, it has the power to turn people into hypocrites. First was this quote from one of Sony Australia’s managers saying that the Wii was “a bit pricey.” If you’re not laughing, it means that you haven’t been following the next gen console battles and aren’t aware that the Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost six hundred dollars in the US, and, according to the blog post, an even thousand of those funny Australian “dollars”. I heard something about the PS3’s price being reduced, where now in the US it will only cost you 500 bucks and a kidney.
Now, there’s this couple of quotes about the system. Somebody from San Rafael game developer Factor 5 called it the “GameCube 1.5” and criticized it for not distinguishing itself enough from the previous generation console. Factor 5, you may remember, is the company that built its reputation with Rogue Squadron VIII, also known as Shadows of the Empire 10.5.1, also known as What the Hell, Let’s Do the Death Star Trench Run and Hoth Battle One More Time Because God Knows You Lapped it Up Like Starving Dogs The First Dozen Times We Sold It To You.
It seems pretty clear to me that Nintendo is taking the same tack with the Wii that it did with the Nintendo DS. That is, release an incremental update to the hardware with a fundamental change in the way the games are played.
I was as big a nay-sayer as anybody else when the DS and Sony PSP were first released; the PSP clearly had better hardware (and it still does), a better screen, and was just a better machine overall. And I’ve seen how wrong I was about that. My PSP is now collecting dust, while I still pull out the DS at least once a month. Because Nintendo knows how to make games; there’s always at least one or two classic, must-have titles exclusive to the system. People remember how they played a game, not whether it had a higher resolution than its predecessor.
I’ve got a couple of friends who work for Sony, so I feel kind of bad for saying it, but: there’s no way in hell I’m getting a PS3 anytime soon. This isn’t like when I swore I’d never get an Xbox 360, either; that was just a case of my trying to talk myself out of buying it. My opinion of the PS3 started with my assumption that of course I’d have to buy one, then changed to lack of interest once I saw how capable the Xbox 360 is, then complete lack of interest once I found out how expensive the thing is going to be, and now active contempt.
The contempt comes from the arrogance Sony’s taken in releasing the thing, and their refusal to learn from past mistakes, like with the PSP. The PS3 just seems completely inessential. It’s just prettier versions of the exact same types of games that are already available on the 360 and the PS2. It’s got a DVD player in a format that no one needs yet, because there’s not enough content available for it. And charging that much for an inessential machine just strikes me as arrogant.
Combine that with all the other little criticisms: the batteries in the wireless controller can’t be replaced; the PS3 only works with its own remote and is incompatible with universal remotes because there’s no IR sensor; the online service sounds as if it’s going to be a big, decentralized mess similar to the one that failed on the PS2. I keep getting reminded of the Memory Stick and the UMD — the company’s shoving formats down our throats, trying to sell us what they want us to have, instead of what we actually want.
The whole videogame console business is seeming increasingly irrelevant to me, the less I become an employee and the more I become just a fan. The 360 does everything I want: it’s got a lot of fun games, it’s got an online system that’s so well-designed I still can’t believe it’s from Microsoft, and its DVD player is streamlined enough that I can finally get rid of my old standalone player. The Wii just looks like it’ll be a lot of fun. The PS3 has so little appeal to me that I figure I’m just not their target market. But with as much Sony crap as I’ve already bought and my tendency to spend all my discretionary income on overpriced gadgets, if I’m not the target market, then who the hell is?
The Cartoon Network is airing an animated Hellboy movie called “Hellboy: Sword of Storms” this Saturday at 6:30pm. I’d heard about the series at the local comic book convention last year, but it’d dropped off my radar until seeing it in a magazine this week.
Because it’s 2006, you can find an online production diary for the series in blog format. I haven’t read it yet, part of my stay-completely-unspoiled policy (which is cleverly disguised as having no free time at all).
My knee-jerk impression based on nothing other than the pictures on that blog: it looks like a more standard animation style than trying to do an exact duplicate of Mike Mignola’s style. That could be good or bad; The Amazing Screw-on Head was clearly made by people who were huge fans of the comic book and ended up being a slavish reproduction. It was neat to see my favorite comic book in motion on a major network, or even the Sci-Fi Channel, but at the same time it felt like there was nothing there I hadn’t already seen. And I haven’t seen or heard anything about the continuation of that series, so I’m assuming it didn’t make a huge impression.
Hellboy (apparently it’s intended to be a series) looks like it’s going for a more easily-animated style, and the synopsis of Sword of Storms sounds like it’s faithful to the comics while leaving plenty of room to be an ongoing action-heavy series. If you want to grab the anime market, start your story in Japan: good idea.
At this point, I’m expecting to have the same reaction as I did to the movie: good effort, nice to see the characters in motion, but on the whole basically forgettable. I’m open to being pleasantly surprised, though.
For years I’ve had a list of movies I need to see to become “movie literate.” Mostly they’re ones I don’t particularly want to see, I just feel like I owe it to myself to get more cultured but without all that tedious reading. And I’ve been quoting them for so long, I feel like I owe it to the moviemakers to actually know what I’m talking about.
I may rethink that homework assignment, though, if all the movies suck as much as On the Waterfront. How did this thing ever get to be a classic?
It’s speechy, and ham-handed, and actually pretty gross in its message and characterizations. It acts like there’s this difficult moral ambiguity going on, when there is none. It’s clear from scene one what’s the right thing to do, and you spend almost two hours just waiting for this loathesome, affected idiot to just do it already. It’s insulting to women, because Eva Marie Saint’s character is nothing more than a stupid girl who digs Bad Boys and will abandon any moral compass she supposedly has just to hang out with one.
And it’s got the worst kind of faux-Populist attitude, where a bunch of filmmakers act like they’re down with the Common Man and they understand the honor and code that comes with life on the docks. But the movie shows the people as nothing more than spineless idiots and bums. They’re not regular joes who are put in a difficult position; in this movie, they’re cowards who will stand by while people get murdered right in front of them.
Of course, the whole business with Elia Kazan and the HUAC is pretty gross, too. Especially when he expects us to feel sympathy for this conscienceless moron who says he’s just trying to do the right thing and doesn’t understand why all the guys gotta be so mean to him and kill his pigeons. But the movie’s bad enough even without Kazan’s attempts to make himself out as a martyr.
I really don’t understand the appeal of this one, at all. I even tried to think that it’s all about context, and maybe it was brilliant in its day. But Rear Window came out the same year, proving that Hollywood could tolerate subtle performances, complex plots, and intelligent women. I thought the US was done with ham-handed, insulting “message movies” as soon as Frank Capra stopped making them.
I always thought that Best Picture winners were at least supposed to be watchable, even if they weren’t really enjoyable or even all that good. Now I’m afraid to see A Beautiful Mind.
DirecTV still sucks. I’ve been trapped in my apartment since Wednesday, missing all the rich, juicy television that’s been airing, waiting for the FedEx guy to finally show up with my new receiver. Now I’ve got to be trapped in my apartment Monday as well, waiting for a service guy to come out and fix the new receiver.
The tech support person on the phone kept going on about how these new receivers were so much in demand, and every time I pointed out that they don’t work, she found a way to spin it. I’m one of the lucky few to be on the bleeding edge of technology, apparently. Ditching TiVo to make their own bug-ridden and less-functional PVR wasn’t a colossally selfish and short-sighted business move on DirecTV’s part, it’s the beginning of a brave new world.
Anyway, the point of all that is that I finally got caught up with the last two episodes of “Lost” by watching them in tiny, pixelated format on ABC’s website. I liked them better than I liked the season premiere, but the whole thing still feels weird. Not the kind of weird that you watch “Lost” for in the first place, but the kind of weird where you can’t quite tell what the people making the show are doing.
It seems like they suddenly forgot how to make a great show and are feeling their way back to it, just based on somebody else’s written description of the series. (And yeah, I said “suddenly.” Remember that I think that season 2 was great.) They know that an island’s involved, and strange things keep happening, and the characters have flashbacks, and didn’t somebody mention a polar bear at one point?
(By the way, spoilers apply from here on out, in case you haven’t seen the two episodes).
So each episode has a really cool sequence — the guy landing on Jin’s car, and Locke’s vision quest. After each, I thought, “Yes! This is the show I got into.” But by the end of each episode, I was back to thinking, “Wha? But I… huh?” The flashbacks seem unfinished; are they going to be extending them across multiple episodes now? What’s the resolution of the guy landing on Jin’s car? Did he really just jump, and that’s the whole story? I kept waiting for Sun to flash back, right before she shot one of the Others, to show her pushing the dude out the window.
And what about Locke’s flashback? The whole point was for him to say he used to be a farmer but now he’s a hunter? No sudden gruesome death of undercover police guy? The pot farmers get arrested, and that’s what he meant by “bad things happen to people who hang around me?” I can see why he waited 69 days for that flashback, because that’s a totally boring memory.
On the whole, it seems like they’ve only got enough material for three episodes, and they’re trying to stretch them out to fill six. And the big revelations are okay, I guess, but they’re stretched out to the point where my reaction isn’t “whoa!” but “whatever.” Jack is going to be tempted to betray his friends, okay, and… here, look at the Red Sox winning the World Series! How weird is that? And Desmond can now remember the future. Yep, he sure can. Look at him, there, standing there on the beach, rememberin’. Hurley sure is freaked out by that, even though that rates about a 4 on the scale of Weird Shit Happening On This Island.
There are three episodes left to go, and hopefully my TV situation will be worked out by the time the next one airs. One of the creators has said that by the end of the sixth, before the hiatus, there’ll be this major revelation that takes the show in a whole new direction that nobody saw coming. I hope they’ve got the goods to deliver.
Do you know what’s the best thing to do for jetlag your first night back home? If you said, “sleep through the day, then stay up all night watching a marathon of ‘Doctor Who’ episodes on DVD,” you’re wrong! Don’t worry, though, because that was my answer at first, too.
I’m definitely no stranger to unnatural circadian rhythms, but being this far out of sync is weird, even for me. Usually I can have a somewhat normal day, just offset a few hours from the rest of the world. Today and yesterday have felt as if I’m stuck in some kind of limbo — I can’t do anything, and can’t seem to get back on track.
It doesn’t help that I had to stay by the apartment all day waiting for the FedEx guy to not show up. I’m still without a functional satellite box, so I’m missing all the TV shows airing this week in addition to all the ones I missed last week. “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” and even “Heroes” and “How I Met Your Mother” are all going on without me, and I’ve been trapped here without any contact with non-televised humans, either.
On the bright side, though, I can’t say enough how much I like the new(-ish) “Doctor Who”. The ones I watched ended with a two-parter set during the London blitz, and it’s the two most enjoyable hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. Everything in the story was telegraphed way ahead, and none of the “surprises” in the plot were all that surprising. But still by the end of it all, I was laughing at just how well-told a story it was, and by how well the ending worked. It’s not going for gritty realism or “adult” complexity; it’s just great, well-crafted storytelling.
And creepy as hell in parts, too. You can tell that the creators of the new “Doctor Who” are going for the same kinds of indelible images imprinted on them from the original series, more of an iconic, emotional reaction than a cerebral one. It’s the same kind of phenomenon that lets us instantly recognize a Dalek and the “EX…TERM…I…NATE!” cry even if we don’t remember watching the original series. And I think the image of a gas-mask wearing boy who wanders the streets of London during air raids, repeatedly asking “Are you my mummy?” is something that won’t be going away any time soon.
Thanks to the International Date Line (1-900-UN-SLUTZ), I have to live Tuesday, October 17th all over again. I feel like I should use the opportunity to correct any mistakes I made the first time around, but I can’t think of anything particularly boneheaded I did other-today. As an added bonus, I should be relatively jetlag-free, since on the plane I slept like a rock. Assuming that there are rocks that drool all over themselves while making noises like a wounded bear being fellated with a leaf-blower.
Hey, here’s something comical: immediately after typing that last sentence, I fell asleep and woke up six hours later. More evidence I’m living in a long, slow, hackneyed sitcom.
Monday was my last day of sight-seeing, and as I mentioned I hit Tokyo Disneyland in the morning and then Akihabara in the afternoon. I think I know why Japan’s bubble economy burst — everybody in the entire damn city spends all their time at Disneyland! I could kind of understand why the parks would be so crowded on a weekend, but being there on a Monday morning in October and seeing all the rides with wait times ranging 45 to 120 minutes just caused something to snap. I became replaced with some alternate dimension anti-Chuck.
I decided I hated Disney and I hated Japan. I was tired of all the cloying, schmaltzy music and the over-done decorations and costumes. I was sick of seeing people walking by wearing clothes that assaulted my native language (“Be a HIGH CLASS! Girl is charming!”). I was tired of maps where south is at the top of the page. I was sick of wandering from one interminable queue to the next, never able to find a trash can. I was tired of seeing a city so intent on regimented population-reprogramming that there are vending machines selling cigarettes and drinks every 20 feet, but you can only drink or smoke in designated areas — not just in the theme parks, but throughout the entire city.
I left Disneyland after a few hours. (Two of those hours were spent in line for Pooh’s Hunny Hunt, which is still cool as hell, but a two-hour wait is pushing it). I took a train ride to Akihabara, the nerd mecca, and just wasn’t in a mood for any of it. By the way, if anyone’s planning a trip to Japan, avoid the Lonely Planet guide books. Four of the noted attractions they recommended, ones that I planned around seeing, turned out to be huge disappointments. Monday’s was the Tokyo Anime Center, which ended up being a room at the top of a mall complex with a TV screen and an adjoining overpriced gift shop. Even the Metreon’s Bandai-sponsored anime-devoted floor was more impressive.
After that, I’d about had it. I trudged back to the train station, past several comics and anime and toy and videogame and electronics stores without heading in to any of them. My train car back to Shibuya had an old woman who muttered constantly in Japanese, causing everyone else to look away and pretend she didn’t exist. She fixated herself on a couple of women with a baby stroller, talking at them for a minute at a time before sitting back down and muttering to herself. Eventually she marched to the center of the car and screamed something at them. She put her hand on my shoulder, pointed at the two women, said something that ended in “baka desu ne?” (“they’re idiots, aren’t they?”) and tromped off. I walked back to the hotel and had a bath.
It’s entirely likely that my crankiness was caused by toxins from my feet seeping up into my brain, because once I’d rested I was in a much better mood. I went to a restaurant in Shibuya called the “Christon Cafe,” which was recommended by a friend of a friend. It’s decorated like a gothic cathedral, with statues and furniture from real churches throughout Europe, and the food was excellent. By the time I got back to the hotel and called it an early night, I was a lot less inclined to write Tokyo off as a failed social experiment. I still don’t think I’d be able to live there for any length of time, but going on vacation once every four years might work.
When I arrived back in San Francisco this morning, I immediately noticed that the level of service took a nose dive. But still, it’s not a bad place to be. It was good to be back home, but unlike returning from Georgia, I didn’t have the same feeling of being desperate to get back to my normal routine. It was a clear, sunny morning, I was back on familiar ground with my own car and my own schedule. I realized that there are still tons of places around here I haven’t seen; I don’t need to leave the country to be a tourist. I just felt like taking an aimless drive, knowing that I could stop anywhere and do stuff and buy stuff without having to point. I could drive to Seattle, or Vancouver, or Denver, or Fresno!
But then again, here I’ve got an Xbox. So I’ll get around to that traveling some more later.
And here are the photos from my trip online: Tokyo DisneySea, Yoyogi Park, the Meiji Shrine, and Harajuku, Asakusa, and Various shots from around Tokyo.
I’d planned to keep the internets updated with the day-to-day progress of my adventures in Tokyo, with pictures and video and all that great stuff. At last, a blog worth reading!
But tonight I’m so very very tired. It’s only 10 PM here and I’m already looking forward to a long, coma-like sleep. What I saw and did today, in list form:
1. Walked around side-streets of Shibuya
2. Took the NHK studio tour (NHK is a Japanese television station)
3. Saw a (really impressive) Taiko performance at some Sri Lankan festival in Yoyogi park
4. Walked around the full circumference of Yoyogi Park
5. Visited the Meiji Shrine
6. Took a couple of pictures of the kids dressed up in Harajuku, before I realized I really didn’t care
7. Visited the Drum Museum in Asakusa (big disappointment)
8. Walked all around the side streets of Asakusa’s temple area
9. Visited the Senso-ji temple in Asakusa (really impressive)
10. Walked around the Senso-ji area at least 4 times, trying to find the tanuki shrine Chingodo-ji
11. Finally realized that I’d been standing right in front of the door to Chingodo-ji four times, but it was closed today
12. Walked to the bridge over the Sumida river, then took the train back to Shibuya
Which, after a couple days walking around a theme park, means that my feet are petitioning to secede from the rest of my body, since the sanctions clearly aren’t working. I’m actually kind of hungry, but can’t walk anywhere for dinner, and can’t afford any of the restaurants in the hotel.
What I should do tomorrow: lie down. What I plan to do: hit Tokyo Disneyland in the morning, then tour the videogame and electronics stores in Akihabara in the afternoon. No telling when I’ll be back to Japan, so I’ve got to get everything in that I can.
Saturday morning there was a 5-magnitude earthquake in the ocean east of Japan. It happened around 6:40 AM.
The reason I know the time is because I’d gotten up at 6 that morning, then promptly fell back asleep and had the following dream: there’s no snooze button on the alarm clock in my hotel (which is true). Even though they could make a toilet that had a built-in remote-controlled bidet and general-purpose ass-sprayer (also true), they were never able to develop snooze button technology. It had become a source of great shame for the people of Japan, and they had their top scientists working to develop a snooze button that would rival the Americans’. At the moment, though, the hotel had to have employees come into my room and gently rock me awake so that I wouldn’t miss my meeting with my co-workers.
Once awake, I jumped out of bed a lot more nimbly than you’d expect from somebody of my girth and general lethargy. I ran to the bathroom and stood in the doorway, remaining there long enough to realize that it wasn’t a big enough bathroom door to have any earthquake-resistant structure, and besides I’d end up standing on the 20th floor of a crumbled tower of rubble in the center of Tokyo wearing nothing more than my boxer shorts. It would be like the heartbreaking ending of Godzilla vs. Sasquatch.
Most of Saturday I spent with co-workers at the Tokyo DisneySea park. Turns out there’s some sort of seasonal promotion going on, so the Tokyo Disney parks were unusually crowded over the weekend. Note that this is “unusally crowded” for a theme park in a metro area population of 40 million people, “unusually crowded” for a place that was crowded when I went on a freezing cold weekday in December. I ended up only riding two things, because there was an almost two hour wait for each.
That’s not as bad as it may sound, because Tokyo DisneySea is all about the themeing; you could say the rides are secondary. The new Tower of Terror, which opened last month, was pretty good — the building itself is spectacular; the queue is interesting and unlike the US versions, actually looks like a hotel; the pre-show effects are really, really cool; and hearing an elevator full of normally-sedate locals screaming their head off was the highlight.
I also rode the Journey to the Center of the Earth ride, which was better than I’d remembered it. I was a little distracted, because the little girl and her mother sitting in front of me kept saying, “kirei!” (pretty!) and I was marveling that I’d actually remembered a word of Japanese.
After DisneySea, we went to Shinjuku for some very good sushi, then a drink at the hotel from Lost in Translation. The nighttime view from the top floor is spectacular, but the rest of the place I’m content to never see again. Mediocre, overpriced drinks, obsequious service (even for Japan); the whole thing had a very creepy feel of excess to it. Still, it’s a place I never, ever, ever would’ve gone to by myself, so it was worth it.