This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin attempts to unlock the neuroscience behind music. What does the brain do to illicit such human attachment to music?
Levitin faces a difficult task with this book — how to explain the science in lay man’s terms while connecting it to our experiences with music. There’s no doubt Levitin, a former record producer turned doctorate, knows his material.
He explains how one of the pathways sound takes to our brain leads to the portion that controls motion and emotion. Music’s ability to move a person — literally — is rooted in the survival instinct to use sound as a warning.
You may have noticed Musicwhore.org is branching out into book reviews with a new category, Book Club.
While I was staying in Honolulu before and after my trip to Japan, I started reading for recreation again. Recreational reading was pretty much been squeezed out by music-making and Internet-surfing in the last decade, and I don’t have a good reading chair.
If I get too absorbed in a book, I’ll contort myself on the futon uncomfortably, then realize I strained something when I reach a stopping point. If a book bores me, I end up messing up my sleep schedule because I dozed off. Those are my hazards of reading while prone.
This time, I’m reading non-fiction. Most of the non-fiction books on my shelves are references, guides or textbooks. No narrative non-fiction. So I used all the flights on my trip to read such books as Freakonomics and Blink. I also passed some time re-reading Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise.
I’m staying away from fiction for the time being because whenever I read fiction, I feel the compulsion to chip away at my own. Non-fiction gives me the luxury of distraction without distracting me to work. That’s really a weird circular reason there.
In the hey day of the CD boom, chain store Tower Records was big enough to publish its own magazine, titled Pulse! (The exclamation point was part of the name.) At one point, Pulse! offered supplemental publications for classical music and video.
Pulse! magazine, dismissed as a shopping guide masquerading as a glossy, did report on the industry itself. It was a poor man’s Billboard, since it was offered for free where a single copy of the industry trade cost $7. Nothing beat free, especially for a broke teenager.
The period of time covered by Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Music Industry in the Digital Age unfolded in the pages of Pulse! as I became a budding listener.
One day of the trip was set aside for my brother and me to do our own things. He opted to explore a region outside Kyoto. I wanted to shoot a music video.
I brought a tripod, and I walked around the Higashi Honganji temple, taking random shots of the courtyard and the trees, which were yellowing in the autumn weather. I also spent a few hours lip-syncing to my cover of "Hallelujah", till the hotel staff had to clean the room.
I took a few more exterior shots, then went back to the inn, only to find the room still being made up. So I spent some time in the inn’s salon, where they had a modern version of a player piano. I tried to get through the only three pieces I knew, and the staff members who were eating their lunch at the time asked me if I was a professional musician. Just a hobby, I answered.
I was wearing a suit for the video shoot, and when I saw the staff was done with the room, I decided to head out to lunch in the suit.
Having grown up in Honolulu, I ought to know a tourist trap when I see one. The French Quarter in New Orleans is designed to be a tourist ghetto. Times Square in New York City used to be just tacky, but now it’s a fucking amusement park. I’ve never been to Las Vegas, but I’m already judgmental of it.
It wasn’t until I realized I hadn’t set aside a budget for admission prices that I concluded Kyoto is a tourist trap — a very beautiful and appealing tourist trap, the kind of tourist trap you from which you would happily part with your money.
Kyoto’s main industry, according to teh Wikipediaz, is electronics, but with so many national treasures in one city, tourism is not far behind. Kyoto was once considered a target for the atomic bomb. The world owes a debt of gratitude to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson for stopping that from happening.
My brother prefers Kyoto over other cities, and most of his stays in Japan use Kyoto as his base.
My brother reserved our seats on the Shinkansen from Hiroshima to Kyoto in the evening, but we found ourselves with time to kill before then.
After two full days of walking, neither of us seemed all to keen to maximize our time in Osaka.
My brother had asked me repeatedly what I wanted to see in Osaka, and I had no clue aside from the Dotonbori. By the time we got back to Hiroshima, I was too tired to add anything else to the Osaka excursion, except for the Umeda Sky Building.
So we decided to set out relatively late — 9 a.m. instead of 6 a.m. — and we wouldn’t stay out later than 4 p.m.
The Osaka excursion would be the big shopping day, where we would visit Tower Records, the primary reason for my heading to Japan in the first place.
I held back pretty much all year, not buying anything through the mail, knowing full well I could just get them in one fell swoop. And the trip to Osaka would take care of it.
"If a city was dreaming … then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping …. Sleeping cities are tame and harmless things. What I fear … is that one day the cities will waken. That one day the cities will rise."
World’s End, Neil Gaiman
I wanted to mention something about cities having their own character, and I thought of that dialogue in The Sandman. Cities are living things — they have their own character, shaped by the people inhabiting them, by the events happening within them, by the geography surrounding them.
Austin couldn’t be mistaken for Dallas, even though both are located in Texas. New York City couldn’t be mistaken for Honolulu. Hell, Honolulu couldn’t even be mistaken for Kahului.
The cities I visited in Japan are no different. Kyoto reminded me of Honolulu. Tokyo reminded me of New York City or Los Angeles. Osaka — definitely Austin.
Hiroshima is world-renowned for one of the most shocking events in human history. But what else could be said about the city? In terms to its size relative to the likes of Kyoto, Tokyo or Osaka, Hiroshima would be … Galveston, Round Rock, Oakland.
The flight from Honolulu to the Osaka-Kansai airport lasts roughly nine hours. When you’re stuck on a plane for that long, service matters, something Japan Airlines understands.
My brother and I sat in an emergency exit row with a pair of flight attendants seated across from us during take-off. When the two ladies bowed to the cabin before take-off, I had a sense this flight may actually be … nice.
They served food. They served drinks. They even handed out hot towels toward the end of the flight. Flights from the Mainland to Honolulu offered that level of service once upon a time but not anymore. I actually managed to begin and finish Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink on that flight.
A co-worker would later tell me Japan Airlines isn’t doing well financially, and that level of service is pretty anachronistic. But the Japanese market demands it, and I was glad for it.
Little things really tickled me. The video for the emergency procedures was completely animated, and they broadcast the take-off and landing on the video screen. In fact, all the seats in the main cabin included video monitors, allowing you to choose your own in-flight movie, headphones included.
(Ed. note: This entry is cross-posted from my Vox site and was published on Nov. 26, 2009. I planned on writing more entries about the trip there, but I think I’ll do that here. I’ll cross-post there later.)
It’s done.
The trip that has caused so much ambivalence has been completed. I can now say I’ve been to Japan. And yes, I would like to return.
I really only wanted to go there to shop, and shop I did. I didn’t want to go with inflated expectations. Too many people think Hawaiʻi is all grass huts and hula skirts, not realizing Honolulu is a major city like any other city on the Mainland.
I had some notion of what the topography of Japan would look like from media — music videos, anime — but I kept my mind open about everything else. And I’m glad I did.
Shiina Ringo? fra-foa? Cocco? NUMBER GIRL? Are they for real?
Why, yes, Holidailies reader, they are. If you regularly spend your Saturday late nights watching [adult swim], you’ve probably encountered some ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, Hajime Chitose, ORANGE RANGE or L’Arc~en~Ciel. Popular music from Japan is not an unknown quantity here in the US, but it’s not anything you would encounter on a Clear Channel playlist either.
And while there are sites catering to worldwide audiences of Hamasaki Ayumi, Musicwhore.org tends to focus on bands that, even in Japan, may not get a widespread audience. And there is room for Utada Hikaru as well.
If the last five days of entries seemed like a whole lot of music geek posturing, well … you’d be right. I don’t hang onto Pitchfork’s every word. I’m not out to outdo Fluxblog, Stereogum or Arjan Writes. I listen to what I like, and I write about what I’m listening to.