The other night I went to a punk show with some of my old students. I knew them from junior high 3 years ago, and sometimes I have run into them around town. I recently ran into them at the station and we got to talking about music and stuff, so they invited me to a show that their friend's band was doing. And it was pretty good. Japanese Punk has a California feel to it and doesn't usually get much heavier than Sum 41, and it's pretty meaningless and fluffy too. It's definitely a far cry from the Fugazi and stuff I grew up listening to in DC. But it makes for a pretty good live show in a small club. I am not sure if I would buy the CD though, because even unknown third-rate punk bands try to sell their four-track, garage recorded demo CD for $25 in Japan. But it was good live. The show consisted of 7 unknown bands, and they all put on pretty good performances actually. There was lots of mohawks and mosh pitting and all the other punk stuff you've seen on TV. It kinda felt like a bit of an act, but since there were seven bands and only one playing at a time, a large portion of the audience was made up of other punk band members, so it wasn't too bad. And I met this random Chinese dude there, who was just in Japan for the weekend and picked a live house randomly out of the paper. He was pretty cool though, and he took some good pictures of the show.