Spoon Market

How does your typical grimy, dark, monotonously beat-driven club become charming, artistic, and genuinely danceable (with warm, understated lighting to boot)? Leave it to the magic of the Tokyo girls' pop community. The heroic Tokyo Pinsalocks are three futuristic-hippie styled rock-and-roll superstars who (with an overtly huggable man named Holly) organized a night of female-fronted performance, food, and art last weekend at Ebisu Milk. The result was refreshing.



If you wanted to have an organic vegetable-based cupcake custom-decorated, you had only to choose which colors. If you wanted your hair trimmed at 3 am, a mere 500 yen would have you looking better than usual at such an hour. If you wanted to buy handmade yarn monsters or spoon-and-fork earrings for your girlfriend, it was all there on proud display by its creators.



And the music, OH, the music and the sass. Falsies on Heat showed us all who was boss. What a relief to watch women so utterly in charge of their sex appeal use their bodies to color the music. Chocolat and Akito invited us back to the funky 1970's in a tiger-striped beret and candy-flavored vocals. The Tokyo Pinsalocks delivered their nostalgic future-Tokyo sound with characteristic "I'm a sexy robot" head jerks. Perhaps most unexpectedly, DJ Daniel Robson (an exception to the female theme, but certainly not unfriendly to it) had me dancing as if my Volvic bottle were full of something else entirely.

My bandmate Kate and I were honored to wear the whimsical designs of our friend Hirose Megumi for our two short sets.



A night like that one reminds me why I put up with living in Tokyo.