A Weekend of Fire & Ice

I just finished a book from George R.R.. Martin’s A Song of Fire & Ice series.

This by itself is neither interesting or cool, but I mention it only for the synchronicity with my own weekend of fire and ice.

Fire..

As in, The Arcade Fire.

As in, guess who I saw in Nagoya last friday night in a small club located down a back alley on top of an apartment building? If you guessed The Arcade Fire you're right, but only because I told you the answer before the question. If you didn't get it, well, I don't know what else to do.

In Japan it is exceedingly rare to get to see bands I love, but when the chance comes it's great because they generally play in far smaller venues than they play at home.

The show was phenomenal. They had high energy from the get go, starting with the building noise-wash of Black Mirror and continuing for an hour and a half through almost all of their released material. The encore included a beautifully delicate but heartfelt cover of The Smith’s Still Ill and of course Wake Up; a song that can get even a typically reserved Japanese audience to sing along. Sadly, no cameras were allowed so you’ll just have to imagine me 10 feet away from the stage...high on the concert, grinning like a kid locked overnight in a toy store.

After the show I went to dinner with my boss, who I had invited along to the concert, as well as a couple other coworkers who we ran into before the show. I ended up missing the last train home and so I went to another bar for a couple of late night beers and then to an internet cafe where I took a little snooze before the trains started running again.

I made it home abround 8am and slept until about 1pm. When I awoke I looked out the window and saw...

Ice...

Well not really ice but snow (I had to make it fit the book series somehow). It rarely snows this far south in Japan, but there is was. It had come unannounced and covert, and now sat there like a silent, cold blanket. Neighborhood children had already raised an army of segmented snowmen; an army whos faces looked to the sun as if to say "Our mission is to march into that ball of pale yellow in the sky and extinguish it while we have this climate advantage, so that our snowsons and snowdaughters might grow into snowdults. so they might attend snowcollege and have snowfamilies of their own and have snowBQs in their own backyards and drink snowdapop.

Sadly, it was not to be. By the next morning only dripping vestiges of the once massive army remained. They had been wasted, emaciated, and dispersed by the unforgiving sun. Sorry guys, maybe next year.