Went to the old neighborhood in DUMBO to try and get some Patsy Grimaldi's Pizza and some ice cream, but got caught up in hella long lines. It seemed like there was some craze was going on and walked around to investigate. It apparently was an event started by some Japanese band called the Boredoms with 77 drummers planned to play for 77 minutes to commemorate 7-7-07.
Everyone knows that 7 is a lucky number but I never knew how much it was a part of Japanese culture:
"It’s a quite primitive concept. It’s related to where Japanese people came from. There is a river called Amur River, in Russia. Amur River is huge, gigantic river, almost like sea. We Japanese come from the north of the river.
North means above, above means cosmic. If you go further up in space, there is a river. A river of stars in heaven. We came from this place. Japanese people have an idea of this subconsciously.
Amur sounds like the Japanese word Ama. Ama means sky, cosmos, the universe. We see the Milky Way as a river of stars, we imagine it’s like a river in the sky.
In Japan, we have the Star Festival on July 7. It is the middle of the rainy season. If we get lucky, we can see Milky Way in clear sky. Every Japanese person knows a romantic myth related to July 7.
July 7 is supposed to be only day in the year you can see two stars on each edge of the Milky Way. People think one side as a girl, other side as a boy, and they are meant to be a couple. They can only see each other, once a year, on July 7, by crossing Milky Way. Where did that myth come from? It came our Japanese ancestors who lived near the sacred Amur River.
The original inhabitants of Japan had a philosophy called Animism, which believes there are numerous gods in nature. They worshiped the gods in nature. I feel sympathy for that way of thinking.
The people coming from Amur were the opposite, rather powerful and systematic. As new settlers the Amur people needed to get along with original inhabitants, so they declared themselves messengers from the sun, messengers of Amaterasu, the sun god. The Japanese people today came from Amaterasu. We come from the sun.
7 is the number when we try to express sun as sound. When I glance at the sun, I see number 7."
I'm not remotely familiar with their music but the event was pretty craze set at the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, just under the Brooklyn Bridge to start @ Sunset. The sound was retarded.
