SLC Launch and TOKYO Book Trailer

If you're here in SLC, I'll be reading and signing this Thursday night, at 7 PM, at The Mandate Press downtown, 1077 Main St, Salt Lake City, UT 84111. There will be drinks and tunes following the reading, so I hope you can come out and join the party! Books will be for sale at the event, courtesy of The King's English.

Also, in anticipation of the upcoming shindig, I've finished a book trailer, cobbling together some footage I shot in Tokyo with clips from a few films, notably Kon Ichikawa's really wonderful Revenge of a Kabuki Actor (1963)—also known as An Actor's Revenge—starring Kazuo Hasegawa in a dual role. I'll have more to say about this film at some point, and how it influenced my thinking about TOKYO. There's also a clip from Musume Dōjōji (featuring Nakamua Kanazurō XVIII), which I saw at the Kabuki-za in its dual onnagata version, Ninin Dōjōji. The poster advertising this performance appears in TOKYO. And I've included clips from two documentaries, The Human Face of Japan and the really remarkable Butoh: Piercing the Mask. The music is by koto master Michio Miyagi—an homage to the repeated line in the book "the sound of a koto"—and you may catch some bits of Iggy Pop's version of "China Girl," from The Idiot, whose rough, monotone anxiety I actually prefer to David Bowie's sharper, admittedly more vocally nuanced version from Let's Dance. Enjoy, let me know what you think, and hope to see you Thursday!