The Modernist Society Jason Mojica and Eric Ottens

This episode we take you to one of the most unique places on earth - Poor Cow.

You may know the owner from such hit bands as Teengenerate, American Soul Spiders, The Tweezers, and Firestarter. If you’re interested, skip the shinkansen and don’t feel bad about temples. The Modernist Society Podcast validates that Poor Cow is not only a legitimate part of Japanese culture, but is The Real Temple.

4th floor in a nondescript building, walk in and you are guaranteed to see most of the following regulars:

Tsune from Young Parasian

Honma from Car Crash

Hiroshi from The Knocks / Flashlights

You just landed in Tokyo and you already have friends!

Closed Mondays. Follow Fifi for day to day updates.



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Jason Mojica

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We chat with Robert Whiting, author of Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa,
Tokyo Underworld and Tokyo Junkie. Robert moved to Tokyo in 1962 as part of the U.S. Occupational Forces and has lived there on and off ever since. He believes Tokyo may current the best city on Earth, and his enthusiasm is infectious. But it wasn't always that way. Robert talks us through his early days in a city still rife with black markets and crime, using baseball as his window into the language and culture and eventually publishing his first book on the topic, a pending screen adaptation of his Tokyo Underworld book, and his latest memoir Tokyo Junkie, which looks back on his 60-year love affair with the city.


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We catch up with Bayard Winthrop. He’s the founder and CEO of American Giant, a San Francisco-based clothing company that specializes in a) making stuff really well, and b) making it in the USA. American Giant has been going for about 10 years now, but before that Bayard ran Chrome, Freeboard, Atlas Snowshoe, and in the heady days of the dot com boom, was the President and CEO of WebChat, which was a big online community that was acquired by Infoseek right before AOL started dominating that space. That's all to say that in addition to producing the "the greatest hoodie ever made," he's a super interesting, super smart guy who’s been an incredible innovator not only in direct-to-consumer businesses, but in breathing new life into at least on area of American manufacturing.


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We hang out with Jeff Pezzati, singer of Chicago punk legends Naked Raygun and talk about all of the things: AC/DC, UFO, Big Black, comic books, Philip Jose Farmer, HVAC, Condor, and the forthcoming Naked Raygun studio album.


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We spend a delightful afternoon day drinking and playing our favorite holiday songs with founder of the OG Washinngton DC chapter of The Modernnist Society, Daryle Macoicha (AKA DJ D-Mac). Obscure tracks played and discussed! Arguments had! Digressions... digressed! This is how all Zoom meetings should be.


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We talk with Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, former publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Catalogs, and co-founder of the Hackers’ Conference. Instead of talking to Kevin about AI, AR, or any of the other technological forces that are shaping our future, we take him back to 1988 to revisit one of his lesser-known books: Signal: Communications Tools for the Information Age. It’s a big, paperback, counter cultural handbook on self-empowerment, DIY education, and harnessing technology at a time when normal people did not know what the internet was.

We also talk to Kevin about his first trip overseas in 1972, and how it led to him bouncing around Asia for decades, taking the photographs which are collected in his forthcoming book, Vanishing Asia.

Finally, we ask Kevin–well known for being an optimist–to help us find the silver lining in the coronavirus pandemic.


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