The hectic pace of Shanghai, China
56 Views of the Modern World via the Pinhole Holga
07/03/2012 by Leave a Comment
There are several things I love about music in 2012. Forced to listen to it for hours at a time, House has finally begun to make some kind of sense to me, though it alternatively plops its repetitive self into the absurd column just as easily. Which parallels my feelings about Jack White’s Blunderbuss. Maybe [...]
I first met Michael Nguyen on a beautiful spring day in Tokyo, the flowers in bloom. We were in a Shibuya park on Meiji Dori, where an anti-nuke rally climaxed in a costumed hippie drum offensive, bursting in the dappled light. If I remember correctly, Mike had a can of beer and a cigarette (he [...]
After nuking Japan, the Americans, in order to protect Japanese society from the dangers of marijuana, passed the Hemp Control Act in 1948. A few years later Japan experienced the first methamphetamine epidemic in the world. During the 1950s, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, approximately 30,000 people each year were [...]
