The Introvert Attends a Party With People Present

This one is hours late. I just got back from a party in Tokyo which makes this drunk blog deux: boogaloo électrique .

For various complicated reasons I decided to attend a party in Tokyo tonight. The party was, in part, a meet-up for listeners of the No Agenda Show (the best podcast in the universe). The podcast is a twice weekly podcast hosted by podfather and former MTV VJ Adam Curry and tech writer John C. Dvorak. The two ramble on about various topics and memes and conspiracies and they encourage their listeners, who they call “producers” to contribute information and/or prove them wrong. When they’re off, much of the show can be infuriating crap, but when they are on their game, there is no show anywhere that better analyzes the news.

My favorite trick of their’s is that when there’s a news story from a far away land that suddenly dominates the news cycle and leads to calls for the stationing of US military forces, especially if similar events have happened before in the same area, do a Google search of that country’s/region’s name and “oil”.  This applies to the Kony and Boko Harram news stories.  For example, search “Uganda + oil” and “Borno + oil” and you get some interesting results. My second favorite trick is to do the same search but add the word “movie”. If you’d done this early in 2013 when a two year old story surfaced about the discovery of missing art stolen by Nazis, you would have found George Clooney’s “The Monuments Men” was coming out soon.

However, what’s important for this post is that I decided to attend a party attended by other people. Adam Curry and his wife Micky Hoogendijk were visiting Japan for an exhibition of her photography. They decided to have a meetup for their local producers, hosted by the Baron of Tokyo Mark Dytham (people who donate enough in the show’s value for value method can be awarded royal titles–really, why is that any crazier than a the Queen of England handing them out?).

Oddly, I felt pretty good about going to this party. I didn’t feel any need to somehow store up energy and didn’t feel any particular dread about going. Well, at least not until the last leg of the train ride when I started to think of reasons not to go and started imagining how many different ways I was going to embarrass myself. I used the same breathing techniques I used to help cure my finger nail chewing and kept myself from freaking myself out.

Adam Curry being more gracious than I deserved.

Adam Curry being much more gracious than I deserved.

After the meetup, the party featured Morgan Fisher and Samm Bennett, who put on a terrific show, a couple pole dancers, who put an, um, interesting show, a couple performance artist guitar players whose names I didn’t catch and whose show went on quite a long time, and the 5.6.7.8s, made famous in Kill Bill. They put on a great show and I wished I could have stayed longer, but the introvert took over and it was time to go.

The 5.6.7.8's put on a show.

The 5.6.7.8’s put on a show.

I met quite a few interesting people. We did notice that the No Agenda producers were a much scruffier bunch than the private party’s other attendees. Also, our hosts Baron Mark and Dame Astrid were terrific hosts and Adam and Micky were a delight despite jet lag and a busy schedule.

And I managed, somehow, to not embarrass myself. Probably.

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