A character taking a break in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo.

There are places in Tokyo where the kids dress up like their favorite manga characters and there are stores where you can try on a costume, have your photo taken, and then you take it off and leave. This is “Cosplay” – costume play – and it’s not to be confused with Fruits (coined by Shoichi Aoki’s eponymous book). Whereas Fruits is renegade acid fashion, Cosplay is about fidelity: meticulously recreating the outfit of your favorite character down to the last sequin and tattoo. I wish I could get this psyched about something; I have no idea who I would dress up as. Maybe Don Draper in Mad Men.

Yoyogi Park near the Harajuku Bridge is one of most popular places for Cosplay: baby dolls, zombies, Sailor Moons, and characters from fantasy movies gather here on Sundays, many of them wrestling and hugging and waving signs and vying to be photographed by the most tourists. Trouble is, I keep pointing my camera at people who don’t want to be photographed because almost everybody here is dressed up crazy and it’s hard to tell who’s on display and who’s just passing by.

Nicolas Jaar – The Student Hairstyle
(from The Student EP. Wolf+Lamb, 2008)
One of my favorite labels has taken an surprising turn lately, moving away from its reliable click-boom minimal sound and releasing meandering records with full-tilt saxophones, pianos, and occasionally ridiculous vocals. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t (I’ve made my stance on saxophones clear many times now), but it’s certainly interesting – and there’s always that bottom-scraping bass. ‘The Student Hairstyle’ is the most balanced mix of these elements on Jaar’s new EP (and there’s no saxophone). See also Smirk and Gadi Mizrahi’s Red Herring.