(no subject)

It's a lovely sunny day here. I had planned to take myself out on my bike this afternoon, and still may do so if I can get a video loaded up soon.

45 minutes ago I was about to write something here but was distracted by the drum-banging and shine-shaking of a passing festival procession. Which inspired me to upload my video footage of the Kawasaki Fertility Festival I attended a few months ago. By "fertility festival" read enormous stone, foam and wooden cocks being paraded through the streets. Angela Carter attended one near Nagoya back in the 1970s and here's something she had to say about it:

"There is a long queue at the bus station. But they do not look like devotees; most of the potential celebrants carry several cameras and have a prim yet salacious air. They might be about to visit a strip-club. There are more foreigners in the crowd than I expected; we all look a little sheepish. Has anthropological curiosity or prurience brought us here?...At last, in the distance, the sound of weird music of bamboo pipes and drums. A breath of strangeness hushes us all. Here is comes - out of the animistic, pagan past, a relic of the days before the Japanese lost their joie de vivre. The crowds surge. Click! Click! Click!... Cheers and lewd cries. The crowd jumps up and down and climbs over itself to fire off its cameras in the direction of the Mighty Cock, as serene, radiant, triumphant, and explicit glory of varnished wood, golden brown in colour, it sails over their heads. Good heavens, it is eight feet long, nine feet long. Ten feet long?... and the ancients shift it this way and that way, so it seems to move about according to a life of its own."
"A Fertility Festival", Shaking a Leg

Later, I may be going to a 180yen bar near Shibuya to meet up with some people. My grumpy self has been telling me all morning that I shouldn't go, but a weird euphoria leapt upon me whilst at the supermarket earlier, and I became much more perky about going out. However, that perkiness is starting to dwindle, so I hope plans are made soon.

Why am I grumpy? Eternal money worries. I felt like moaning to everyone about it earlier, but I've lost the will to do so. Maybe some other time...

Hmm, interesting afternoon slumpage is overtaking me...