In high school I drove a brown 1980 Datsun 510 that could easily be described as “disaster chic“.  It didn’t have a dashboard but it did have a stock tape deck that would slide around loose on the exposed plastic heating vent duct as I’d swing around corners or drive over curbs.  For a long period of time, I had only two tapes in the car and I would listen to them every day on my cold morning rides to school.  Since one of them was a recording of “Spooky Halloween Sounds” I would primarily listen to either of two sides on a TDK D90 cassette tape.  One side had a copy of Jacko’s 1979 breakthrough solo album Off the Wall while the other was a recording of Primus‘ Sailing the Seas of Cheese.  It’s a cassette with a one-two punch that I would never seem to get tired of.

A few years ealier, my family had acquired a VHS copy of Bill & Teds Bogus Journey, most likely by dubbing it off of Encore or the Starz Network.  Primus only appeared briefly, during the battle of the bands sequence of the film and, although it only featured mere seconds of Les Claypool singing the last few lines of Tommy The Cat, I would watch it repeatedly.  Just that brief clip fragment.  Over and over.  Rewind and Re-Rewind.  A decade and half after this appearance Les Claypool actually wrote, directed, scored, and edited an original film of his own.  When it eventually came, the film arrived in the form of a mockumentary about a struggling jamband. (more…)

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One of the first people contacted after starting MonsterFresh.com, was our writer known as D.W. Patton. It may have been the last time that I saw him face to face when we were sitting at the China Town bar in Olympia, Wa. We traded manuscripts. I gave him a 19 page paper I had written about my theories on time travel and Satan while he gave me a copy of a play that he had written entirely of Elizabethan dialogue involving a half-man/half-woman Brian Bosworth separated vertically down the middle. He is currently teaching children in Japan and has written 3 articles for the site about his experiences living in the Island Country. He has covered such topics as spending the 4th of July in a foreign land, Japanese Porn, and even cultural transplants such as McDonalds. I had hoped to receive more content based around these observations from an outsider and have had occasional emails with Patton pertaining to such aspirations. He had planned to send an article to me about the bar scenes and drinking in his current location but it has yet to happen for one reason or another. There was even hope that I could get the Zomba group to grant him free access to a Backstreet Boys concert in Japan so that he could report on the continued boy band frenzy and the juxtaposition of the two pop cultures coming together, but that didn’t work out either.

D.W. has been very busy with work and other responsibilities as of late. I was recently thinking about him and his work. I had thought to contact him about possibly writing some more facinating content for us when I noticed a message in the MonsterFresh email account. Somehow during a correspondance with a friend of his, their email conversation was accidentally forwarded to me. Although I still hope to receive some material tailored specifically as an article and/or to work with him more in the future in one form or another, I quickly realized that the email that I had in my posession was a genuine article that represented some very deep and honest feelings for him at the time it was typed. It was written from a sincere place of evaluation for both his environment and his place within it. I know that he holds his time and experiences in Japan very dear, and that he truly does have respect for the culture and opportunities that he’s had over there, however, if I plan to print honest unfiltered material on this site, and I do, I felt that I could not overlook what I had read. I contacted him and Patton agreed to let me post his letter without hesitation.

I hope, as I’m sure that he does, that this is read, not as a document of slander for a place and its people and culture, but as a look into the effects of culture shock on one’s psyche and emotional health and well-being. He has confirmed that this letter accurately represents his recent feelings as a foreigner living in a distant and very different land. Hopefully, this will further help those of us who read it, to re-evaluate the way that we too treat and view people around us who have ventured outside of their own cultural safe-zones with adjusted and more conscious approaches to what they may be experiencing. Below in bold type is that letter.

-DEAD C (more…)

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