Good Eats – Musashi – Director’s Commentary
Good Eats – Musashi from Daniel Morales on Vimeo.
00:28 The music is “Yakiniku” by Papa Grows Funk. They are a New Orleans-based Funk band with a Japanese guitarist named June Yamagishi. He hails from Kyoto but moved to New Orleans in 1995. I know he played with the Wild Magnolias for a while and probably some other local bands, but around 2000, Papa Grows Funk grew out of a group of musicians who would jam on Monday nights. There’s a nice set of interviews with with the Papa Grows Funk members on YouTube, including a three part interview with Yamagishi in Japanese. If I remember correctly, the saxophone player wrote the song “Yakiniku,” but it has a great guitar lick and is inspired by Yamagishi’s cooking.
If you’re looking to pick up some of their music, I’d recommend their second album Shakin’. They occasionally tour in Japan, and I’ve seen them once, but the tickets were about twice as expensive as back home.
00:39 I love the combination of old and new you get from the SL Hiroba. The old, crowded neighborhoods on the Shimbashi side and then the shiny, new glass buildings on the Shiodome side.
00:42 The New Shimbashi Building (that big, kind of white-checkered one), however, is just terrible. It must have been some architect’s vision of “the future” seen from the 1970s. It’s a giant mistake because this vision turned out to be the perfect pigeon roost, forcing them to cover the awfulness in mesh wiring.
01:19 I can’t believe these guys sit in 正座 the whole time.
02:20 I was running low on either battery or tape when I took this footage. I never got the perfect shot of the guy serving with the paddle. I was hoping to get a nice angle of him swinging it around widely, but didn’t have good enough timing.
02:40 I hate it when Americans have a laugh at tofu’s expense. It always seems to be the butt of the joke when it comes to flavorless foods. I’d argue 1) that their palettes aren’t experienced enough to appreciate the subtle flavor of plain tofu (the stereotypical tofu) and 2) that they haven’t tried enough different tofu dishes. Ageatsu are so coddamn tasty.
Original post here.
