Daily Archives: March 17, 2020

Mark Stanley in Run

RUN Directed by Scott Graham Certificate 12a

THE Aberdeenshire town of Fraserburgh is the setting for this moving and well-cast drama.

A port, it has a long association with trawler fishing and processing the catches. It is depicted as a place of hard employment and few thrills.

This setting provides a backdrop to a family hewn from the granite, suggesting the environment breeds a certain dourness coupled with hardiness and stoicism in the men and women who live there.

Finnie (Mark Stanley) has grown up in the town and once got his kicks as a boy racer, screaming his souped-up car along the dark roads, slamming it round corners, and finding a sense of escape from the long nights through revving engines.

Now the father of two and tied to a fish processing production line, the cheap thrills of the past have gone but not been replaced.

Partner Katie (Amy Manson) sees he needs geeing up she buys herself a party frock and him a new shirt, but his response is theres nowhere to go and what is the point.

He looks, perhaps enviously, at his teenage boy (Anders Hayward), who is now behind a wheel himself and zipping into curves while playing loud bassy music.

The drama unfolds after an argument at home sees Finnie steal his sons car and take it for a spin, picking up his sons pregnant girlfriend Kelly (Marli Siu) en route. Cue some soul searching at high speeds, like a version of Fast and Furious for psychoanalysts.

Mark Stanley is fantastic: it seems extraordinary he is the same actor who starred in a release last week called Sulphur and White, in which he plays a City banker. The character here is the complete opposite and he has done both with real conviction. Stanleys downplayed approach makes it completely believable, his end-of-the-world sensibility haunts each scene. He is backed by a wonderful cast.

There is a theme of Bruce Springsteen lyrics running through the story Finnie is a fan and that he relates to the Blue Collar Blues Springsteen sings about is another clever trick in bringing this moving story alive.

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Hitting the nihilism on the head - Camden New Journal newspapers website

Photo: South_agency/Getty Images

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On any given weeknight at the Bushwick tiki bar Happyfun Hideaway, there are dozens of Tecateslurping, margarita-sipping young Brooklynites. When the weather takes a warm turn, that number doubles as droves of drinkers show up in the backyard, Telfar bags in hand. On Wednesday night, however, despite the onset of spring weather, the crowd had thinned, as people across New York began to grapple with the question of how to navigate life in the middle of a pandemic.

At 9 p.m., six young people sat inside: one man, blasted and teetering upon his stool, two men eating each others faces, and three more chatting in a grimy corner.

In the last hour, Trump had mandated a travel ban, the NBA season was canceled, and Tom Hanks announced he had tested positive for the virus, but the mood among the Gen-Zers at the bar remained light. The kissing couple was soon replaced by another heavy-petting duo. I went to the grocery store today, purred one of them. The bartender said, I think people are scared, but its overblown. Theres an arc to everything.

On the patio, conversation between college students returned to coronavirus every few sentences. The thing is, young people shouldnt travel. As a young person you should stay away from traveling and large crowds, a young woman studying at Pratt argued. Her Kurt Cobainlooking companion retorted, But Ive never had the money to go to L.A., talking about cheap airline tickets. The conversation lulled, briefly, before he added,Each cigarette you roll is a work of art.

They drifted from conversations about moving apartments back to the viruss impact on their graduations, from breakup drama to information theyve gathered about the virus (I dont think my sister made that up. She works in politics).

The boy joked about video-chatting into his class at NYU, telling the professor he tested positive in order to get out of class, and made snarky comments about a neighborhood DJ: Im glad the coronavirus has derailed his career.

A couple of young women on the patio displayed similar nonchalance. One shook my hand, then immediately lit a cigarette, putting her fingers to her lips without pausing to apply hand sanitizer. Asked whether or not they felt any hesitation going out for drinks, they chimed together, Oh! No! No! Not at all! Have they done any prepping? God no. Last I checked theres plenty of toilet paper on the shelves. When I asked if they would consider canceling their weekend plans, they said no. Im still on Resident Advisor [an online electronic music community]like, Whats up?!

Its chilling. Its something you cant really avoid, even if it was as deadly as some people think it is, said another Pratt student to her friend, a blonde-bobbed NYU grad. I use the subway every day, so Im fucked either way Now that I need to take care of today, Im just like Why would I think about the future?

For members of my generation, the COVID-19 pandemic is our first major crisis, and its hard to see my peers corona-nihilism outside of the major political and historical events that have happened during our lifetimes. We are an age group (18 to 23) that, for the most part, doesnt remember 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis. We dont know the existential dread of impending war or impending bankruptcy. The 2016 election was a crisis, but it was also one we were able to tangibly react to, through student activism and renewed interest in policy.

Texting with nearly a dozen friends my age, living in places from Alabama to Los Angeles to New York, I asked if they were worried about the virus. For the most part, they are worried, but mostly about marginalized communities and health-care workers and the possibility of becoming walking death traps for the elderly. As for themselves, one friend in New Haven said, Self-isolation for a month is a lot in a college students life. Also, on a less serious level, Ive had to cancel a bunch of dates.

Knowing they arent the primary target of the virus, they tweet things along the lines of The way boomers are feeling about coronavirus is the way millennials and gen z folks feel about climate change all the time, and make coronavirus memes. One is a drinking guide to online lectures; another reads, Well Id rather be dead in [insert name of a shitty college town], then alive in my hometown. They make TikToks, one to the tune of Thats Amore: When the class moves online, and the boomers all die, thats corona!

As tasteless as these conversations might seem to older folks, its also difficult to imagine my generation not reacting this way. Born into a dying world, ultraconscious of the overheating planet, our nihilism makes sense. But then, this prideful sense of invincibility may well just be characteristic of anyone that age. Per Didion, [O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before. In this case, its true for Gen-Z, corona is a coming-of-age crisis, the likes of which we havent seen before, and its hard to know whether or not to have a Wednesday night tiki drink.

This morning, a college sophomore texted me, If I havent died yet from my Juul or the nasty ass bar I work in, I think Ill survive the coronavirus.

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Drinking Beer in Bushwick Amid a Pandemic - The Cut

Disclaimer: AlterNet does not endorse candidates but I personally support Sen. Bernie Sanders. The opinions expressed here are my own.

Monday evening saw a brief outrage cycle on social media when a clip of Joe Biden ostensibly telling MSNBCs Lawrence ODonnell that he would veto even a gradual approach to Medicare for All went viral.

Joe Biden just said he would veto Medicare-for-All because it would delay healthcare coverage.

His own healthcare plan leaves 10 million people uninsured.pic.twitter.com/mpW6Z58miB

jordan (@JordanUhl) March 10, 2020

joe biden just said even if the democrats pass a m4a proposal through the house and senate, he doesnt know if hed sign it into law citing cost

hasanabi (@hasanthehun) March 10, 2020

Others parsed Bidens answer and came up with a different interpretation.

Okay, youve seen that viral tweet about how Biden said hed veto Medicare for All. Thats clearly NOT what he said. He says what his opposition is based on, says he agrees with it in principle and goes out of his way not to say hed veto it. Watch and decide. pic.twitter.com/hcqnnsnIqy

Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 10, 2020

It is certainly not news that Joe Biden opposes Medicare for All, and, as many people pointed out, a Democratic Congress would never send a major piece of legislation to a Democratic president who would veto it. The White House coordinates with Congressional leaders throughout the legislative process.

But what made this kerfuffle especially pointless is that Democratic primary voters have narrowed a once-large field to two candidates who oppose killing the filibuster if Democrats hold the House and win control of the White House and Senate in November. Theres certainly ideological space between Sen. Bernie Sanders and Biden, but both are committed institutionalists with deeply flawed theories of how to overcome Republicans central belief that Democratic leadership is inherently illegitimate and the relentless obstruction that flows from that view.

Biden believes that he can work with moderate Democrats, which is probably true, but he also says Republicans fever will break if Donald Trump is dealt a decisive defeat. According to Biden, they will come to rue their refusal to take governing seriously and be willing to cut deals across the aisle. Hes gotten things done on a bipartisan basis in the past, and he promises that he can restore some measure of the comity that made our legislature more or less functional for much of his career.

Sanders promises that he will build a large, transpartisan movement of working people that will transcend partisanship and ideology, and bring so much pressure to bear on lawmakers that moderate Democrats and at least some Republicans will have no choice but to support his transformational agenda. (He also favors a backdoor mechanism for working around the filibuster: getting a Senate parliamentarian in place who would assent to passing complex legislation through the budget reconciliation process. This would be widely perceived as illegitimate and leave the filibuster in place for the next Republican majority to kill outright.)

Both of these theories share the same fundamental problems. We live in a heavily polarized society thats divided by culture as much as by politics, and the right has built a sprawling media network that keeps its consumers cocooned in an alternative set of facts. Geographic sorting and gerrymandering have resulted in a huge number of uncompetitive districts where Republicans rightly fear for their jobs if they wander even a small distance from conservative orthodoxy. They fear that demographic shifts will reduce them to a rump party of the South, and believe they have no other means of maintaining power other than by undermining American democracy. And rightly or wrongly, moderate Dems face deeply entrenched conventional wisdom that moving too far to the left will cost them their seat.

Most politicians first concern is being re-elected, and neither Bidens collegiality nor Sanderss mass movement is going to change that equation. Killing veto-pointsby getting rid of the filibuster and somehow addressing the Republican takeover of the federal judiciarymight.

According to NBC, the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America is putting pressure on the last two major Democratic candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, to call for eliminatingthe 60-vote thresholdto pass legislation in the Senate. Perhaps one or both candidates will reconsider their position. If not, there isnt much point in debating the merits of their health care plans or proposals to combat climate change or anything else that cant be accomplished through executive action.

then let us make a small request. AlterNets journalists work tirelessly to counter the traditional corporate media narrative. Were here seven days a week, 365 days a year. And were proud to say that weve been bringing you the real, unfiltered news for 20 yearslonger than any other progressive news site on the Internet.

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Democrats respond to Republican nihilism by narrowing their field down to two tradition-bound institutionalists - AlterNet

If you were on social media at the beginning of 2020, the year started as profoundly pessimistic. Instead of a Jetsons-style chrome-coated future of flying cars, we have the COVID-19 pandemic, memes of a third World War and, to top it all off, a continent on fire because of human-induced climate change. And on the internet, all of it was meme-d.

In short, we are beginning a new decade all too aware of our fragility, not only as individuals, but as a species. And yet, we have been here before.

By the middle of the 20th century, humanity had been through two world wars that had unleashed the power of science in a search for ever more efficient ways of exterminating each other. This rapid descent into the possibility of species-ending thermonuclear death prompted the philosopher Karl Jaspers to ask in his 1961 work, The Future of Mankind, how humanity should deal with humanitys ability to end, well, humanity.

But as Rahm Emanuel, one-time mayor of Chicago and former White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, once said: You never want a good crisis to go to waste. Looking around the world, we have an existential crisis.

Read more: Explainer: what are memes?

Humanity, Jaspers observes, is in a unique situation; we are at the dawn of the thermonuclear age. He says that it is an entirely novel scenario for humans to not only to be aware of their mortality but to also be alert to the likely ending of their existence as a species through nuclear war. He argues given this bleak reality:

a prerequisite of everything else, is to think: to look around; to observe what is going on; to visualize the possibilities, the consequences of events and actions; to clarify the situation in the directions that emerge.

We can do this by using our rationality and reason even if, as Jaspers concedes, we cannot plum the ultimate depths. But reason gives us clarity as we experience the calamity of events caused and carried out by humans.

But you might ask: how can you trust reason if its reason that gave us the ability to annihilate ourselves in the first place? Jaspers offers at least two responses.

First, we are easily distracted. Instead of dealing with these ultimate questions, we tend to become preoccupied with other concerns such as economic prosperity.

Second, there is a distinction within how we reason between intellectual thought and rational thought.

Intellectual thought, according to Jaspers, is concerned with the production of the mechanistic parts of our existence where we pool our resources to get things done. (This is similar to an amalgamation of philosopher Hannah Arendts idea of labour and work aspect of life that was outlined in her 1958 work, The Human Condition.)

The activities that fall under intellectual thought would include the production of resources that sustain us (like agriculture) and the construction of structure like roads and buildings that live beyond the person who constructed them. These are necessary activities, but the thought processes behind them thinking largely of our own individual survival cannot lead to solving failures in collective action or the species-level existential crisis we now face.

Jaspers describes rational thought as thinking that must be done by the individual by choice, resolve and action but that creates a common spirit. (Here again, there is a similarity to Arendts concept of action.)

What we need is this category of rational thought not only to reason as individuals, but ultimately, act as a collective in everyday decisions. The recent climate strikes would be an example of that kind of creation of a common spirit. This movement was carried out by individuals who each individually concluded that action must be taken.

Neither hopelessness nor confidence can be proven by rational knowledge. The arguments for despair, deducing inevitabilities from total knowledge, are inadequate, as are the arguments trusting in the victory of common sense. Despair and confidence are moods, not insights. We call them pessimism and optimism. Neither one is open to persuasion; each finds infinite arguments and overlooks the counterarguments. - Karl Jaspers, 1961.

Jaspers is not providing a panacea on the proper response to the realization that our self-destruction is not only possible but likely.

Instead, hes asking us to take radical ownership over the fact that if the world does end or convulses through terrible near-death experiences, we need only look, take a selfie and realize who is to blame. Jaspers demands that each of us has a responsibility to use our rational thought and then act.

It seems clear, however, that, despite the nihilism and pessimism of the memes that erupted over the internet this year, people understand the direness of the situation.

Nihilism requires a deep trauma of belief, meaning nihilists need to start in a state of idealism which is then ground out of them by experience. However, the deep belief is still inherently part of them, and it is that constant juxtaposition that fuels their idealistic resentment and reaction to the objective world around them.

We are reacting like stereotypical teenagers in an era where leadership has come from actual teenagers like Greta Thunberg and Autumn Peltier. Jaspers advice might contain precisely the wisdom thats required for adults to grow into our maturity. We have taken the first step by recognizing our predicament, but we need to go from wise-guy cynicism of meme culture to earnest action.

Link:

COVID-19, climate crisis, conflicts: Meme-ing our way through the 'apocalypse' - The Conversation CA

captionSamantha Morton played Alpha on The Walking Dead.sourceJace Downs/AMC

Samantha Mortons character, Alpha, has lived according to the motto, We are the end of the world, on AMCs apocalyptic zombie series, The Walking Dead.

Currently, that motto may hit a little too close to home as people practice social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic.

But Morton is much more positive about the state of our world, despite her characters nihilism.

I dont feel were at the end of the world at all, Morton told Insider when asked about any parallel between her characters outlook on life and reality.

My feelings are the world is constantly changing and we have to adapt and change with it, she continued. If, as a society, we need to learn new habits and new behaviors to prosper whether its to do with the environment or to do with love or respecting other cultures we just have to adapt and survive. I dont think its the end of the world at all.

Mortons character was killed off TWD Sunday. In a nod to the comics, Negan infiltrated the Whisperers, gained their trust, and when the timing was right, took her out. Morton told Insider she knew exactly how she would be killed off since joining the series as the leader of the Whisperers on season nine.

Now, with Alpha out of the picture, its looking less like the Whisperers will be able to bring their end of the world agenda to life.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC. You can follow along with our Walking Dead coverage here.

Original post:

The Walking Dead star says the coronavirus pandemic isnt the end of the world. We have to adapt and survive. - Business Insider

The fear is looming

When the disease was in China, it felt like it was far away. Now that it is in our neighbourhood, its seeming too close for comfort. We have begun to catastrophise within the darkness of uncertainty. We are feeling helpless, clueless, and powerless. And this is driving us to nihilism. Some of us are thinking about whether

- we will succumb to this virus

- well have access to a vaccine

- well be alive to see the end of this

- our jobs are safe anymore

- stock markets will ever stabilise

What the present is looking like

Our worry is not limited to our own health. Its extended to fretting over the health of parents, grandparents and children. A lot of us dont know how to entertain our kids during this extended school break. Or what we should do with so much spare time working from home. Were stocking up more food and supplies than our houses can accommodate. Were glued to social media, and obsessed with forwarding information without assuring its legitimacy. Memes and jokes are taking up more of our time than ever before. Anxiety is rippling through the ocean of humanity. The earth is quaking with uncertainty. What might become of us after this?

A dark future?

Natural as well as man-made disasters have the propensity to generate chaos, and render human beings powerless. There are bound to be immediate consequences like sadness and apprehension over the loss of loved ones, health, jobs, money, and security in general. Those with inadequate coping defenses resort to alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and other substances of abuse to help combat angst. However, in the longer term this lengthens psychological turmoil, resulting in more permanent depression and anxiety. Lower income individuals sense more stress because social distancing impacts their jobs and daily wages notably. Were already seeing unrest and vandalism in some countries over securing food and housing supplies. An incessant fear of the unknown can convert us all into nervous, guarded, and mistrusting human beings. And those already battling anxiety and depression stand greater tendency for catastrophic panic. Prolonged stress dilutes immunity further. If we dont contain the anxiety pandemic rightly, we might see a physically weaker human race, purely attributable to our psychological shortcomings.

There is hope

Countries are realising the need to strengthen healthcare systems and replenish health budgets. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore governments adopted stringent measures for containing the disease, people obeyed; and saw positive results. Self-quarantine in Italy drove residents to unanimously sing together every evening from windows of their apartments an orchestra of a hundred homes altogether. In many cities, people are offering free babysitting, tuition classes, art lessons online, pick up and drop services for kids where needed; as well as food delivery for vulnerable older adults.

In spite of all the darkness, history has proven that some good always comes from the bad; that humans cognise, devise and improvise with time. The biggest yet simplest lesson humanity can learn, is that prevention is better than cure. And that we can take simple steps now, and in the future, to avoid the spread of any and many diseases. That cleanliness is important every day. And kindness doesnt need a time table. That children learn from observation how to relax in times of crisis and not go into a state of frenzy. And its good to spend time at home in general, not just during a pandemic.

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Coronavirus: What will become of the world? - Free Press Journal

Underneath all of the knock-knock jokes, references to the 1997 Giants and awful puns, theres a deep streak of nihilism inside of me. Its impossible for me to shake the feeling that the universe cares about us as much as it cares about a random moth from 4,000 years ago, and once you sink into that pit, theres no bottom. Nothing matters. There are good days and bad days, medications and self-medicating. Ive always suffered from anxiety and depression, even when things are normal.

When things arent normal, it can be just a touch overwhelming.

But throughout all of it, somehow, Ive also had a deeper streak of amusement and wonder to combat the nihilism. On any given day, its usually winning. Were here, all of us, right now, because two very specific fish had sex 375 million years ago. That allowed us to exist and be capable of giggling at the mere mention of Travis Ishikawa. Its beautiful. All of this is so...

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Brisbee: The world is terrifying right now and I need your help - The Athletic

Album:Greatest Hits (The Abbey Road Session)

Artist:Therapy?

Label:Marshall Records

Genre:Rock

In todays musical climate, any band that has endured for 30 years without a split, hiatus or implosion of any kind is a cause for celebration. Northern Irish rock trio Therapy? wanted to mark their milestone anniversary in some way, but a standard Greatest Hits compilation just wasnt cutting it. Instead, the Andy Cairns-fronted trio decided to pack up 12 of their Top 40 UK hits, take them to Abbey Road and re-record them with producer Chris Sheldon, who oversaw most of their biggest successes, including 1994s Troublegum.

Indeed, most of these songs are culled from that landmark album, and while the likes of Screamager and Trigger Inside may not encapsulate the same angry young man nihilism of yesteryear, they still bristle with energy. Teethgrinders grungy riffs still thrill and Neil Cooper is more than capable of matching original drummer Fyfe Ewings skill behind the kit.

Other tracks, such as Opal Mantra and Stories, are somewhat forgettable, but Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfields turn on the enjoyable Die Laughing works well. Their best-known song, Nowhere, still kicks the hardest, though ably demonstrating that Therapy? can rock as hard as they ever did, three decades in.

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Therapy? Greatest Hits (The Abbey Road Session) Back on their old stomping ground - The Irish Times

Photos courtesy of Captured Tracks.

G.I.S.M, Gauze, The Stalin, Guitar Wolf; these are some of the bands responsible for exposing Japanese youth to punk music in the 80s. All of them had a familiar taste for chaos that closely aligned with hardcore punk in America hard, fast and heavy riffs formed the basis of their music. Nudity, nihilism and violence were often part of their live performance. You can see it for yourself in some of the grainy archival footage thats been uploaded to YouTube. But among those early pioneers of Japanese punk was another group, OXZ (pronounced Ox-Zed), whose legacy you might be less familiar with. Thats because they were a band of three women, who werent offered the same social capital as their male counterparts at the time.

Formed in Osaka in 1981 by Mika (vocals/guitar), Hikko (bass) and Emiko (drums), OXZ was one of the first bands to challenge the mechanics of Japanese punk and ensure it wasnt simply defined by machismo and the male gaze. Mika and Hikko went to the same high school, they met Emiko at a venue in Osaka, and soon realized they all had the same desire to play in a punk band. However, at the time it was almost unheard of for women and young girls to embrace the more aggressive style ascribed to punk. While they often played in high school cover bands, there were few allowances for women who wanted to write and perform their own original music, especially during the boomer-era. It simply wasn't acceptable to trade having a family and keeping a tidy home for the looks, lifestyle and ideals of punk rock.

In a booklet that accompanies Along Ago: 1981-1989, a new retrospective of the bands material thats being released this month by Captured Tracks, music historian Kato David Hopkins writes of the bands beginnings: there were very few women in the underground music scene at that point, and none of them dressed like punks or dyed their hair, or showed much interest in declaring complete independence from the usual rules. So in 1981 when Hikko, Mika, and Emiko first appeared together as OXZ, they were an intentional shock.

While they often played with many of the countrys leading hardcore bands, that tag is perhaps a little misleading when applied to OXZ. The trio had a more melodic, beat-driven and often shaggy sound that leaned more in the direction of bands that were big in Britain at the time X-Ray Spex, Sham 69 and The Raincoats provide clearer points of reference though they also incorporated elements of grindcore, no-wave, psychedelic rock and what would later become known as grunge. OXZ was not only one of the primordial Japanese punk bands, but they were also one of the first to transcend the genre.

Ahead of the reissue of OXZs first three EPs, a single, and several of the bands unreleased demos, we caught up with Mika, Hikko and Emiko to learn more about being in one of Japans first all-female punk bands.

Who are some of the bands that inspired you to play punk rock music?Mika: I was inspired by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Patti Smith, Johnny Rotten and by PIL. But when I began to play with OXZ, I thought we were the best.

Hikko: The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Damned and other Japanese underground bands around OXZ. I also like Mick Karn from [the band] Japan.

Emiko: For me it was Led Zeppelin. I love the drumming of John Bonham.

Can you describe how you came up with your own personal style?E: I would buy things at vintage shops and I would cut and sew them and make my own clothes. My parents had an avant-garde clothing shop, so I naturally made up my own personal style.

Who was the first punk that inspired you to dye your hair and change the way you looked? E: It was not from punk. I didnt like the discipline at school. It was forbidden to dye your hair, everybody had the same length hair and the same uniform, we had to have the same look. I grew up with parents who looked avant-garde, so I naturally started to change my hair color when I was fourteen.

How did people react in 1981 to seeing three women on stage playing punk rock? M: We were people of interest, so they looked at us with curious eyes.

E: They were either attracted to us or afraid of us.

Why were they afraid of you?E: Because my looks were very different from everybody else's. People were not coloring their hair or wearing innovative clothes.

Can you describe some of the places in Kansai where you used to perform? H: Eggplant, Studio Ahiru, Bares, Donzoko house, Kyodai Seibu Kodo were some of the places. It was different at each event, but there was often a lot of hardcore punk bands.

E: Hardcore punk style meant black leather jackets with pen drawings on the back, rivets, etc. The audience was wearing the same kind of clothes tight black jeans, chains, piercings. There were also many people in T-shirts and jeans.

What was the social climate like in Japan in the 80s. Were women expected to behave a certain way?E: The Japanese education system and the social climate had a lot of conservative values in the 80s. Some people would spit and shout dirty girl at me because of my look. In terms of womens behavior, you were expected to keep your mouth shut.

Where were you when people would spit and shout at you, and how did you respond to that? E: It happened in the streets when there was nobody around. I was just sad, without really having much of a reaction to it. But most of the time when people saw us in the subway or at supermarkets they were afraid of us.

Were there other women making punk music in Osaka in the early 80s?E: There were some girls playing the bass or the keyboard, but not in all-girl bands.

H: There was an all-girl band a few years after us, Sekiri, in the Kansai area.

What was it like playing in other parts of the country, were people as open to your music as they were in your hometown?E: Our music was a bit different to other punk bands, so it was strange music in our hometown, too. Many punk bands were playing eight beats with major chords, whereas OXZ was influenced by other kinds of music psychedelic, new wave, hard rock and the blues. We got the same reaction when we played in other parts of the country.

Shonen Knife is another well-known Osaka punk band from the early 80s. How were they different to OXZ?E: Shonen Knifes members were Mika and Hikkos school mates, but they were playing poppier songs, with cute looks. I much later realized OXZ's genre was more no-wave, the beginnings of grunge music.

Did you remain friends with Shonen Knife after you finished school?M: Shonen Knifes drummer, Atsuko, was a good friend of mine in high school, but we didnt play in the same band so we eventually got more and more distant. When I met her by chance at a venue last year we were happy to have some time to talk. I also ran into Naoko, Shonen Knifes guitarist, two years ago at an event in Japan and we talked a lot.

A big part of American and British punk culture in the 80s and 90s was creating hand drawn posters and fanzines. Were people doing a similar thing in Japan?H: I dont think there were many fanzines. There were some flyers from each venue with a written schedule, some stories, and Manga [comics]. We didnt have much money, so no computers or typewriters.

M: I remember everybody was making posters and flyers by hand, one by one. It was very interesting, each flyer had its own character.

How did you get around, did you have a tour van?E: We didnt have a tour van, we just used a standard car whenever we toured. I used to get around on my motorbike. There werent many girls that had permission to ride motorbikes.

Why did the band break up?E: Our music was getting more complicated, we were mixing with other genres of music, changing rhythms, etc. Hikko didnt want to keep going and Mika and I didnt want to keep OXZ going without her.

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OXZ were the first Japanese punk band to take on the patriarchy - i-D